Oral-History:Richard Gowen (2009)
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, 14 November 2009
Interview # 522 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 [email protected]. 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 2009 by John Vardalas, IEEE History Center, Piscataway, NJ, USA.
Interview
INTERVIEWEE: Richard Gowen
INTERVIEWER: John Vardalas
DATE: 14 November 2009
PLACE: Newark, New Jersey
Early life and education
Vardalas:
Oral history with Dr. Richard J. Gowen, 15th of November 2009.
Interview taking place in Newark, New Jersey.
Interviewer is John Vardalas.
Thanks very much, Dr. Gowen, for agreeing to do this. We’re going to do this in four parts. The first will be your years leading up to becoming an engineer. That will be very brief. Then your involvement in IEEE as a volunteer before you became IEEE President. Then your presidency. Then finally something about the IEEE Foundation and its relation to IEEE.
Gowen:
Okay. Great.
Vardalas:
Let’s start with your formative years. Do you recall at what age you first became interested in science and things technical? How early in your life did that happen?
Gowen:
Fairly early. At one time, I wanted to make a boat. I didn’t have anything to make it with, but I discovered I could get tin cans and a soldering iron, and I put them together and made a boat out of tin.
Vardalas:
Oh, really?
Gowen:
That was the first attempt to try to put something together. Then I went on and, oh, when I got to high school, I had a chemistry teacher who was very supportive. She encouraged me to think about doing something in engineering because I was interested in what was happening. I remember making a little electrical xylophone that could play Christmas carols. Then I started to really wonder, “what about engineering?” Then I applied to Rutgers [University], and that’s all I did. I applied to go to Rutgers, I didn’t apply anywhere else, and I thought that would be great. As it turned out, I got accepted at Rutgers and I got a full scholarship. It was a wonderful opportunity.
Vardalas:
What made you chose engineering over chemistry, physics, or math?
Gowen:
You know, I really didn’t think much about science at that time. Chemistry, physics, were all there, but my orientation was to do something with science.
When I looked at science, I was more interested in would it work. What could you do with it? I had [thoughts] of doing something. I always enjoyed hands-on activities, applying ideas, and making things. It has always been a part of my background
Vardalas:
Were your parents professionals? Did they encourage your interests?
Gowen:
I got a lot of encouragement from my grandmother, from my mother, and from everybody involved, but they were not professionals. In my family, I’m the only one that really went to college.
Vardalas:
Oh, you’re the first one then.
Gowen:
And I’m the last one. [Laughs] I have two brothers and a sister; or had two brothers. They passed away. Yes, I had a lot of encouragement in school to go on.
Vardalas:
The chemistry teacher, in particular?
Gowen:
Oh, other teachers, encouraged me also and that felt good.
Vardalas:
Where did you go to high school?
Gowen:
I went to high school in New Brunswick, [New Jersey].
Vardalas:
In New Brunswick?
Gowen:
Nancy, my wife, and I both are from New Brunswick. We met in high school. We met in a game at the stadium.
Vardalas:
No kidding?
Gowen:
Yes. She was a baton twirler. I carried the flags for the parade. I saw this young lady that got my attention and I guess she must have felt the same way, because that’s how we met.
Vardalas:
When you went to Rutgers, you enrolled in electrical engineering as opposed to any other form of engineering.
Gowen:
I did.
Vardalas:
Was there something about electrical that attracted you?
Gowen:
No. It was a combination of factors. I was interested in math and what one could do with it. I was beginning to experiment with electrical things like wiring dielectric magnets and things like that, so when I got to university it seemed like EE [electrical engineering] was the best place to go.
Once we started in electrical, the general feeling among the group of us that had come in was this program was going to be hard. We also thought that if we made it through this program, we could go anywhere. Several of us joked that if our EE courses did not work out, we would go over and be in business. [Laughter].
Rutgers
Vardalas:
What do you recall of your university of engineering education at Rutgers? What recollections do you have of it? Its diversity, its quality, what do you remember about it?
Gowen:
Oh, it was very good. We enjoyed it. Several of the professors come to mind and I can see talking with them and being in class. It was very intense, but still very, very open. There was almost comradery between the professors. We got to know each other, professors and students. There was a group of us students who worked together throughout our university years. We were the three musketeers.
Vardalas:
Do you keep in contact with the other two people?
Gowen:
No. We’ve lost contact. Orville was one and Ed was the other one. When we went in, early on, we were all just wondering what was going to happen. We kind of played off, back and forth with each other. We became lab partners, and we did design together.
Vardalas:
How early in your engineering university education did you choose the area that you wanted to specialize in? When did you decide, or did you decide, this is the area of electrical engineering that I want to do?
Gowen:
The first time that became interesting was probably my junior year. Since EE, at that point in time, was pretty much orientated towards preparing you professionally, there were not really a great number of breakouts. This was a time in which you were an engineer, and you were an electrical engineer. It took a broad curriculum. Now, I took machine shop, and I took all kinds of surveying activities. I did many of those things. It was a broad base. What caught my fancy were discussions on using computers to do things. At that junction, I was drawn into computer logic. What did logic mean? That topic fascinated me.
In my senior year, I did a project on Maze-Mastering Mice. Transistors were really not yet available to me, so the logic in my project was built around relays. Westinghouse, in New Jersey, made relays. I contacted the company and got a whole bunch of relays.
Then I went down to one of the labs in EE where the department gave me a corner to work in. Here I started to make this Maze-Mastering Mouse. John, it had to be run by a generator. The DC for the magnets required a motor generator set! To give you a perspective of its size, I had put the object up on four chairs and I would stand in the middle to work on the relays. Some of the professors would come by and joke, “Well, you haven’t electrocuted yourself yet. That’s good.”
Each mouse had a magnet under it. Using a piece of glass on which the mouse sat, I created an X-Y plotter. We then created partitions within which the mouse would move. The mice would encounter walls as they searched for a piece of cheese, which was their goal. We then tracked the mice’s movement. I put the project in for the IEEE Student Paper Contest. The only trouble was that when I had to submit the paper, my project was not up and running yet. I thought, gee, “it’s February and I didn’t have to really get it done until June, but I had to push to get it through. I did get second place in the IEEE Student Paper Contest. It was a great story to talk about. I imagine that the department must have had this great big pile of junk lying about, after I left.
As we were leaving university we were told, “Transistors are your future”. We all looked at each other and wondered “what does that mean?” How were we to know about transistors when they didn’t teach it in any of our classes? We learned about pentode. We were told, “Treat transistors as though they were pentodes and then you’re going to know what to do with them.” We all looked at each other and thought “this is crazy.”
The magnet, basically, had the mouse on top of it. In order to be able to have a cue of some kind, we worked – whether, when you hit a wall, that you would know that you had hit an object, so the mouse would come back. We put this together, and you could make a square with partitions in it.
Vardalas:
That’s surprising though, being so close to Bell Labs, they didn’t get a hold of transistors in the fifties. You graduated in 1957, right?
Gowen:
Yes, 1957.
Vardalas:
Didn’t transistors appear somewhere in the Rutgers curriculum?
Gowen:
No. I think, where we were, it was still not clear how you would do it. And remember, that most faculty are comfortable when they can talk about 150 percent preparation. Only if they know how it works are they comfortable teaching it. Rather than get into a lot of transistor work, we had a demonstration of transistors, but we all wanted to know what do we do with it because we’re walking out the door. We thought the next thing we’re going to get asked when we were out in the workforce was to use transistors.
Vardalas:
A lot of engineers go right to work after graduating from university, but you chose to go right to graduate school.
Gowen:
No, I didn’t.
Vardalas:
No?
Gowen:
No. No, I went right to work, as a matter of fact.
Vardalas:
Oh, that’s right. You joined the Air Force.
Gowen:
No, no. I was in ROTC. At Rutgers, in those days, during the first two years, everybody had to be in ROTC.
Vardalas:
Is that right?
Gowen:
As a land-grant college, Rutgers required ROTC. In the 1950s, having just come out of World War II, and with the Korean business going on, everybody was still committed to having ROTC at Rutgers. So, for two years, I took ROTC, and then I had the opportunity to go contract. In contract, you got paid for being in ROTC. A couple of us in EE [electrical engineering] went on contract. A good friend of mine went into the Army ROTC and I went to the Air Force. When we contracted, we knew that we might get called to active duty, but by then it was pretty quiet. The Korean War had died down and we were still wondering what was going to happen with Russia. When I graduated, I was put in the Reserves and I figured well, this is good.
Although when I graduated the economy was kind of tight, people were looking for engineers. I had several opportunities to get interviewed for jobs with companies and still be in the Reserves. Then I heard about an opportunity at RCA Labs. That was something very special. RCA Labs was a big deal for us. None of us figured we had any chance of doing anything at RCA Labs. Nevertheless, I cut an EE lab on a Thursday afternoon.
I had arranged to go to RCA Labs, in Princeton, for an interview. I visited with the HR person, and he welcomed me in. I thought, “this is going to be neat.” I’d get a chance to see the labs and really get to know what was going on. Instead, I had the interview totally different from any other I had up to that point. I had had several others.
The RCA interview started with two people coming in, putting me against the blackboard with a piece of chalk, and challenging me to answer questions and show what I knew. Now I didn’t fully understand what an oral interview was like, but this was an oral exam.
In most of the interviews that I had had, the company would explain what it could do for you. The RCA interview was, “what are you going to do for us?” Here I was up by the blackboard and as soon as I could answer a question, there was another question. I started to get frustrated. I wanted to tell them what I knew, but I didn’t have to. When they felt satisfied that I understood a certain topic, we went off to something else. I had three interviews: two people in each, for half an hour each. In total an hour and a half of oral interviews.
All I could think of when I was finished was “God, you never really explained anything.” I found myself sort of walking out of the interviews and feeling dumb. I met with the HR person again. He asked me “how are your other interviews this year?” I told him what they were like. And his question then to me was, “what kind of money do they pay?” I was feeling very, very low. I told him about my best interview and how much they were going to pay me. Then the HR person concluded with, “we appreciate you coming out.” I got nice courtesy, and I left. Actually, I felt pretty bad about it, because I really didn’t get a chance to say much. Two weeks later, RCA Labs gave me the best offer. They topped all the offers. Even if they hadn’t, I probably still would have wanted to work for them, because it was really a great opportunity.
RCA, Air Force
Vardalas:
For which group within RCA did you go to work?
Gowen:
I was part of a group to make mural television. The goal was to make a large wall out of television.
Here I was, the new kid on the block, coming in. They gave me a desk, and they told me that they needed to get characteristics graphite to understand how graphite would work. The idea was to make the wall out of graphite; to create a display by putting electric charge in the graphite. My job was to understand the various parts of graphite: size, current, and current density. Prototypes of some of the early televisions were stored above my desk. It was a very neat place to be. If I needed DC current, then I just went down to the store and I bought a bunch of batteries. I could get anything that I needed. It was like going to a candy shop. I bought a great big pile of batteries. I remember some of the other engineers coming by, looking at my set up, and commenting, “you’re going to electrocute yourself.” I replied, “but they’re only batteries.” That’s how I started.
Then one day I had this little letter that came in the mail, and it said, “greetings and salutations.” The Air Force had decided that they needed to bring up ten electrical engineers to save the nation. Nancy and I didn’t know what we were getting into. By this time, we were married. We packed up and went down to Biloxi, Mississippi.
Vardalas:
Biloxi, Mississippi?
Gowen:
It was the first time that we had really traveled outside of the East Coast. Biloxi is on the shore. It was an interesting place. Initially we stayed in a motel. I remember the first evening after finishing dinner, we went for a stroll on the beach. When we came back to the room, we looked down and the floor was moving. There were little spots that were moving. Nancy and I looked at each other and wondered, “what are they?” They were roaches. “Oh God,” we thought to ourselves, “we don’t want to stay here. We’ve got a baby. We don’t want to be involved with this.” We went outside and asked some of the people in the other rooms, “do you have any bugs in your room?” They answered, “Oh, they’re only roaches. Don’t worry about it. They won’t hurt you.” And we thought, “God, where we come from, you don’t want to have roaches.”
Vardalas:
This is tropical south, right.
Gowen:
Yes, well, we didn’t know that. We went back to our room and spent a sleepless night making sure that no roaches got in the crib. The next day, we moved. We found this garage apartment above a nice place that didn’t have any roaches, so we moved in there and stayed for six months.
Vardalas:
What did the Air Force want you to do?
Gowen:
The Russians had come up with a bomber capability that could fly very low. The radar that we used up in Canada, in the DEW line, was typically radar that was long-range search. It was on mountains and the concern was that the Russians would fly down in the valleys.
The Air Force had developed a new radar capability. They put ten of us into a special program and taught us how to run “gap filler” stations to fill the gaps in the radar net. There were ten assignments: two in the states and eight overseas, in special services. We had high security clearance. We were trained in the kinds of things that we needed, so we had crypto. Fortunately, I had the choice of the class. I came out on top of the class. We looked at the two assignments in the U.S. One was at Panama City, Florida, and we decided, the south is nice, but maybe we wouldn’t go there. The other assignment was in Yaak, Montana.
Having grown up in New Jersey, we didn’t have any idea where Montana was, let alone Yaak. We ended up going up to Montana. It was forty miles by logging road to the nearest logging town. It was ninety-five miles to where we had our post office box for the radar site. It turned out to be an excellent post-graduate course in human relations. It turned out to be a really great experience because there was something like a dozen officers and 200 enlisted men and it gave you a different perspective of what was an Air Force and how it functioned.
Vardalas:
How did you make the transition from all this radar stuff to your graduate work in biomedical instrumentation?
Gowen:
At that point in time, I had a commitment, I think, to be on active duty for three or four years because of the funding that was given for ROTC. The military said, “you owe us some years.” We didn’t know what we were going to do. Being on the radar site was interesting, but, after you’ve been involved, there were a lot of crazy incidents that made the television program, MASH, look real. [Laughter] For me it was good, personal management interaction, because I had lots of people to interact with.
Then one day there came an announcement that the Air Force had opened the Air Force Academy. I looked at that and thought to myself, “I’m going to be involved in the Air Force for a while, maybe the Academy would be something interesting to do. I applied to go be on the faculty of the Air Force Academy. I was selected with the provision that I get a graduate degree.
Committing to pay for graduate education the Air Force then announced that it was going to send me to Iowa State. Once again, we, the kids from New Jersey, were going to Iowa State. Along the way, we had acquired a trailer. If you’re going to live at the radar station, you had to have a trailer. We had bought a trailer in New Jersey, moved it out to Montana, and now we’re moving to Iowa with this humongous trailer. We tried to sell it, but could not, so we set off for Iowa.
We had hoped that the trailer wouldn’t show up, that it would fall off some hill [laughter]. I recall sitting at an A&W and watching it come down the street. Here comes this humongous trailer, and we said, “oh, my.” We wound up parking the trailer in Hickory Grove Trailer Park. We hear bang, bang, bang as the hickory nuts fell on it. One day, the trailer started to shake. The cows had come up and scratched their backs on the trailer. We had great fun, going through life when you’re young.
I didn’t know what to expect at Iowa State. I had enjoyed Rutgers, but Iowa State was a bigger school. The engineering people were very impressive, very good. My first classes were in computers. I was going to be a computer science person. I began to learn about how you could take a number from here, move it to that register, add it to this number, and that’s where we were. We had no higher order languages. The excitement in computers was the ILIAC in Illinois. Iowa State was building a new ILIAC. Things were moving and it was an exciting time. At the same time, down the hall there was a group that was talking about biomedical engineering. That also sounded interesting, so I went down to visit them.
The space program was starting to grow. We were at Biloxi when Sputnik occurred. The Air Force had talked about a manned space program, along with NASA’s. If there were military reasons for going into space, then the Air Force would do it. While I was at Iowa State and in computers, people were talking about the biomedical applications in space. I thought to myself, “if the Air Force is going to go there, that’s something I should do.” I always felt that if you’re going to do things, take the path the least walked and have fun. Biomedical programs were just starting, and it looked like a challenge, so I wanted to get on Board. I didn’t know what I was going to get. Vic Boley, who was the professor, was a great advocate of what you could do - mathematician, EE background, and he’s got to be theoretical, all the issues coming.
It was a very special time. In the department, a distinguished professor, Bill Hughes, was leaving to be the department head in Oklahoma. Bill and I would later in life come together. On his departure, I had the chance to use his lab, so I took a push-broom, as a graduate student, and cleaned all the lab out. Later on, Bill Hughes became a vice president for me, when I was in the university [South Dakota School of Mines and Technology]. When I would later tell this story, he’d be quick to point out – “and now I clean up after you every day.” [Laughter] That was a relationship.
It was a neat time; a small graduate program was getting started. When I took my oral exams, the physiology department was part of the program. I took anatomy, neuroanatomy, organic, P-chem, and all the bridging courses between what you do in engineering and what you would do in life sciences. We went to the veterinary school. We did animal experiments. We did all of the things you would do. I took EE. My first minor was mathematics, my second minor was biomedical, and my thesis was in biomedical. I took all the traditional double EE graduate program, and all the basic courses that you would have, and then on top of that, mathematics, and then on top of that, biomedical.
Vardalas:
In what area of biomedical research did you do your thesis?
Gowen:
I became involved in cardiovascular research. My master’s thesis was in exploration to see how you would measure blood pressure. At that stage, we did not have a lot of special capabilities. My Ph.D. thesis looked into measuring blood pressure while the subject was walking on a treadmill. Instead of putting an arm cuff on, the objective of my work was to find a non-intrusive way to measure blood pressure while there was a dynamic situation, with the arm moving instead of being immobile. That led to a discussion of other places on the body from which to get blood pressure. You get blood pressure here, you get blood pressure here, you get blood pressure in a lot of places, but I settled on the finger. I became sort of an expert in how you could read blood pressure off your hand. This led to the first patent on measuring blood pressure from a finger.
Vardalas:
And that’s just as accurate as any other place?
Gowen:
You had to do relationships. But if you chose to go in the finger, into where this part of the finger is, the vessels are very close to the surface, and they’re large enough that you can measure from them. I ended up making a piece that you could put your finger into while you were walking, and it just rode on your finger while you were walking. It came along your finger and held it, so it was totally free, and you could measure blood pressure.
Vardalas:
Was data being transmitted?
Gowen:
We transmitted light. I used the diodes and receivers, which were available. Transistors were coming. The device I made had tubes because we did not have enough transistor capability to bring it together. This work qualified me for my Ph.D. I finished my program in thirty months, both a master’s degree and Ph.D. The Air Force was funding me fulltime. I could go to class and do everything I needed because I didn’t have to work, so I was very concentrated.
I’m ready to graduate, so I take my thesis and papers over to the graduate school. They look at me and say “you can’t graduate. You haven’t been here long enough. You’ve got to be here for three more months.” I finished my graduate program, but I had to pay Iowa State for three more months. When you’re at university, you don’t think of it as a business, but it is. I spent those three months doing animal experiments and theoretical experiments on blood pressure and vaso motor response. I looked into the question “how does the body, in a controlled loop, control blood pressure.”
Roughly speaking, 40 percent of our body is filled by blood. The rest of the body is under control. If you get shock, your blood basically bleeds into your body, and you don’t have enough blood to keep alive. But that control is important. While I was looking at control, I did animal experiments. Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, I did an experiment on a dog. I went through a lot of animals in the process, and it gave me a whole different perspective of what is an animal, how does it function, what is a living body like. In the end, staying at Iowa State for the next three months was great. It gave me a special education.
Vardalas:
This is a perfect segue into your work in the space program.
Gowen:
Yes. I graduated, went to the Air Force Academy, and began teaching. At the Academy, one taught five lessons over two days. I taught the basic course. Every kid had to take two courses in electrical engineering. Circuits and systems were put together into two courses. Someday, these students were going to be involved in buying systems or managing systems. We were preparing the future leaders and the generals.
One day I got a call from NASA. One of my fellow graduate students, who had been with me doing his master’s degree, went to work at the Johnson Spaces Center [JSC]. At the Johnson Space Center, they were bringing together biomedical programs and looking at instrumentation. They were looking for people. They wanted to know if I had any interest. I really didn’t fully understand what I was getting into, but I went down to NASA and talked to them. When I left, they gave me a $35,000 contract.
I went back to the Air Force Academy. In those days, that was an unusual contract. I came back and I didn’t know what to do with it. Nobody knew what to do with it. I was bringing a research contract into an undergraduate teaching institution. How was I going to deal with a research contract? I went to the finance office and gave it to the colonel. He looked at me and said, “you can’t have this.” I said, “well, I don’t have it anymore, you have it now.” And that started a research program.
We built a laboratory, the Quick Response laboratory. JSC was interested in cardiovascular response, and they picked me up because, as an engineer working in this area, I seemed to understand what they wanted. This is a life science group. These were physicians and cardiologists, people involved with internal medicine, and here I was, an engineer, an outsider, talking about how you can do all these things.
For twelve years, I had a contract association with NASA, and we took one of the teaching labs and turned it into a lab in which we could do testing. The lab was an observation room, with one-way glass. In that room, we initially put in a tilt table. Now a tilt table, if you think of it, it is like taking a board, pivoting in the middle, like a teeter-totter, and on that board, you put a little bit of a saddle. Then off the sides of the board you put out places for the arms. The test subjects were placed on this table. They would leave their arms out and the buttocks was on a paddle, almost like a little saddle. The legs had nothing on them, so the legs became pails, bags. When you tilted it up, the subject’s legs would fill with blood. Fluid from the body would go towards your blood. It’s like getting out of bed when you’ve been sick. You suddenly stand up and you feel a little woozy. In this case, we took the person who had been laying and tilted him up. Our goal ultimately was to know if we could put people in space and for how long.
When we started, that’s what the folks at JSC asked us to study. It was an interesting time because we were moving toward the ability to measure fluid flow in the human body. We knew that if we were going to do something in space, we had to simulate what would happen if you had artificial gravity and how you could measure that.
We began to look at the questions of what was happening in space to our crews when they went to the moon or in Skylab. Now Skylab was to be a laboratory that you could fly and in which you could do tests and experiments for thirty days, sixty days, and ninety days. Do not forget, at that point in time no one had been in space for a long period of time. In the U.S., the space program was to prove this nation could do tremendous things. The Russians were doing tremendous things. We were in a race with each other. The goal, however, was more than just getting to the moon. The goal was then how could you be in space for long periods of time.
Vardalas:
Was your research program a big first for the Air Force Academy?
Gowen:
The Air Force Academy, as part of the Air Force Program, had a laboratory at the Academy, but it was for astronautics, areas related to navigation. For example, orbital navigation was an issue, how could you control, how could you miniaturize gimbals.
At the Academy, on the academic side, almost like any other university, we were starting a research program. People looked at me and said, “we don’t do that here, but all right, we’ll give you a chance to try this.” We started it and
I hired seven people: two physiologists, a secretary, and technicians. At one time, we had up to something like twenty-six, or so, officers as test subjects. We were doing tests to see how well instrumentation worked. We picked people who were flyers, who could be qualified in the space program, who in effect would act as surrogate astronauts.
AIEE
Vardalas:
At this point, I would like to leave this aspect of your professional life for another interview. For the rest of this interview, I want to focus on your involvement in professional engineering associations. You joined IRE, right?
Gowen:
No. In fact, I joined AIEE.
Vardalas:
Why not IRE?
Gowen:
AIEE was well placed in Rutgers. The orientation of the professors was AIEE. There were some in IRE, but I wasn’t in that area. I was more over into the basic EE, so that was the AIEE. At the time, Rutgers had an AIEE student section. It also had Eta Kappa Nu.
Vardalas:
Well, you had it good.
Gowen:
We also had Tau Beta Pi. These were special recognitions meant a tremendous amount to the students and it gave them a feeling of what it was like to be involved in a professional association.
Vardalas:
Did you join AIEE on your own accord or did a university professor say you should join.
Gowen:
Oh, no. That may have happened, but that wasn’t the issue. The issue for us was that this was something we were going to do.
Vardalas:
Did you continue your AIEE membership in graduate school?
Gowen:
I was in AIEE, and when I went to graduate school, we didn’t have much other choice. As an undergraduate, I was inducted into Eta Kappa Nu and Tau Beta Phi. When I got to graduate school, I got the awards for Sigma Si and things like that. The IEEE became sort of the carry-on. When I got to the Academy, in the first year, there was talk about trying to do a Section or a Subsection in Colorado Springs. That’s when I basically became involved in IEEE. At the time I had just become a captain. My department in the Air Force Academy had majors and colonels. There were enough people talking about being involved in the Section, so I joined the group. I then became involved as secretary or treasurer. During the time that I was at the Academy, I kept involved in what was going on in the local area. It was a Subsection at that point.
As I did more research, I became associated with EMBS, the IEEE Engineering in Medicine and Biology Society. That is where I began to go to present papers. The first paper that I presented was as a graduate student. When I took my thesis, I went to San Diego and presented my first paper at a biomedical meeting. That gave me the chance to meet the biomedical people. I enjoyed being there. It was a frightening experience. “My God,” I thought, “I’m going to travel. I’ve got to go off and make my own presentation.” I did that and it turned out well.
IEEE Engineering in Medicine and Biology Society
Vardalas:
Did you get involved in 1964? Was it a new Society when got involved?
Gowen:
It was a new Society that was being formed. The whole biomedical field was new. Biomedical groups were just forming when I was at Iowa State. The EMBS [IEEE Engineering in Medicine and Biology Society] was an effort by the people interested in biomedical to get recognition within IEEE. While at the Academy and as I presented papers, I began to understand that you could be involved with the Society, so we came together to form a new Society. While at the Academy I became involved in the leadership of the Society, and I was elected to be an Ad Com member for EMBS.
Vardalas:
At that same, you rose to become president of the Society.
Gowen:
I did. I don’t know that I can prove it or not, but it appears that I was the first biomedical EE, Ph.D., in the United States. I sort of came out of the chute at a time in which things were just beginning to come together.
After I got to the Academy, I also became involved with ISA, the Instrument Society of America. I became involved with ASEE [American Society for Engineering Education], for education, and at ISA, I organized a biomedical committee. At ASEE, I organized NASEE, a biomedical group because I had begun to traffic around in the meetings, and as more graduates came out, we got to know each other. It was like a fraternity of people who were just coming out of the programs, putting on their thesis descriptions, and talking about where they were going. The programs were new, so we got to know each other in a very important way.
As part of all this activity, I also became involved in putting together a certification for clinical engineers. For several years, we developed an examination, a certification process, and we had competitions. We actually ended up having competitive certification-type programs. We had not come together yet. The physicians dealt with the American Medical Instrumentation group who were selling equipment to the hospitals. So, the hospitals knew who the American Medical Instrumentation group was, but then, over on the other side, were the professional people, the researchers. On the IEEE side, as we came together, there were some very distinguished professors, who had put programs together, and then there were young people, like me, sort of the young Turks, who were putting things together. We wanted a spot in the organization. We talked about how we could get on the Ad Com, and what we could do.
One of the other things that brought all these efforts together was the National Institutes of Health. The NIH was interested in understanding what could happen with biomedical research. How would it impact the National Institutes of Health? One gentleman in NIH, who was engaged in information and libraries, was interested in how one would categorize the growing subject matter in our field. So, he funded a small program, which I ran, trying to come up with the key words. What are the key words that you put in the biomedical [literature]? I did that as the Transactions were about to emerge. A group of us would take the papers, we would read them, and then put the key words down. That built a key-word index.
Vardalas:
Was the Air Force Academy supportive? All the professional work ate up a lot of your time: all this volunteering, all these committees, all these things you’re doing; plus, you’re teaching.
Gowen:
An interesting sequence of events happened. When I came to the Academy there wasn’t a major program in EE, so the question was, could you get majors? That put me in the position to put an EE curriculum together, which gave me recognition within the group. Then, when the space program started, there was talk about putting people together for the Skylab Program. At that point, they were looking at how could you launch people who were not astronauts, and a call went out for what was called science astronauts.
I applied and was put forward by the Academy. I became one of the eleven nominees for the Air Force to go into this program. I passed all the physicals, I was space-qualified, I could fly, everything. That was December. Ten days later, in January, I took the kids ice-skating, I fell, and I couldn’t walk, so I then was no longer a candidate.
Vardalas:
That must have been devastating.
Gowen:
It was devastating because I knew I wanted to go. This injury forced me to think about what else I could do. The people at the Academy knew me, and then when we started the NASA Program, I became more involved with the design. At the Academy, I formed the sort of finishing school for our cadets in EE. They all took their design course with me. All of the things we were doing fed into that. At the Academy, being involved in IEEE brought in new ideas, as did being involved in other universities, so it all came together.
The Academy had tenured professors that were there basically for life. They offered me a tenured position. That’s why I stayed at the Academy for fifteen years.
Normally, one only had three to four years at the Academy, but I stepped out of the normal teaching line and became part of building programs. I did the program for, What Could I Do Here for Space.
At the Academy, I also did other things for the Air Force. I was involved in weapons systems. I was involved with looking at the idea of putting a cave down in a Cheyenne Mountain to house a recovery center that would withstand blasts so that one could have a defense center. I was involved with looking at the kinds of things that were of interest to the government. The first research I did at the Academy was to make a little pill. It was a pill about this big, but it was a radio transmitter. You put that radio transmitter into sheep, and you put the sheep into a nuclear reactor, because we did not know at that time, all of the effects. This was to study the effect of nuclear exposure.
I was involved with a lot of things, but when I was working with IEEE, the mainstream things that I was doing were very much associated with being an officer, being part of the military. From the Academy’s point of view, I probably couldn't do the things I did somewhere else. But at the Academy, with all the instruction and the growth ideas I was kind of one of those young professors that got along pretty well.
The Academy was very good for me in dealing with cadets and talking about how you could do things. The fact that I did all these things gave me the credibility to talk about a design course. In my design course, the cadets contracted to do projects. I told them, “You make a commitment, you’re going to have to do it.” I recall there was one Christmas, in which we had a group of cadets that decided that they could instrument the efficiency of a house. One day they came to me and said, “we can’t do it. We can’t solder it; it’s too cold outside.” I said, “Well, you agreed that you were going to do this. Now, you didn’t think about what was going to happen in the winter, when you proposed this, so what are you going to do about it? You aren’t finished yet, until you do the job.” So, we talked about what they could do. They went out and they decided that if they could shelter what they had to solder, they could get the thing done. They came back to me and said, “we did it.” And I said, “go home. Now they’re ready to go home for Christmas.”
That’s all part of the role I had at the Academy. My idiosyncrasies and things I would do, were kind of tolerated because, it is sort of part of your being a professor. I had a lot of opportunities.
Vardalas:
Your work with IEEE and all these various professional activities, and then your work at the Academy all fed off each other?
Gowen:
Yes. Travel got to be an issue. The superintendent had blanket orders to go somewhere. There was another person at the Academy who had blanket orders to go somewhere.
Vardalas:
What do blanket orders mean?
Gowen:
You didn’t have to have anybody cut you an order.
Vardalas:
Oh.
Gowen:
You had blanket orders that said if you need to travel, you can travel now. Blanket orders permitted you to get tickets and pay for anything you needed. Because of my involvement in the space program, I had blanket orders. I was part of the medical launch and recovery team for the last manned space flights.
People were worried about, would cardiac muscle atrophy, and what was happening in the cardiovascular. I built instrumentation and we flew instruments in Skylab. Well, to keep that going in the space program, I needed to be at JSC, at the command center, or at the Cape. I would go down to the Cape, fly out, test the astronauts when they got in, and their final hours. I got to them just before they got in the spacecraft. Then we went out in the ocean and when they came out, I had them a half-an-hour later, in the sickbay. So, very unusual kind of involvement.
Vardalas:
You had blanket [orders]; you could go, you could travel.
Gowen:
I could go wherever NASA asked me to go.
Vardalas:
Right.
Gowen:
All I had to do was explain why I was leaving, of course. I was not necessarily mainstream in the Academy, but that was all right for the Academy.
Then that’s why [my] IEEE came together. Giving research presentations, and meeting other researchers was all part of the Academy’s job. The Academy officers were all IEEE members. They understood my involvement with IEEE, so the Academy supported my professional side. Although the Academy is a military organization, at the EE department level, it was a group of people who were basically doing innovative things.
Then Vietnam came up. The members of the Academy were looking at gunships, at that point, and at how could you use technology to be able to support the troops. We were very much involved, not only in the astronautics and into what you would do biomedical, but there were other areas that we were associated with.
Vardalas:
I’ve interviewed several men who started in the Societies and the technical side and then rose up to IEEE President. When they’re in the Society, their world is a Society. The interests of the Society come first. Can you recall, as president of your Society, how did you perceive needs of the Society in relation to IEEE? I’m sure there must have been some tensions.
Gowen:
John, what you have to remember is that my Society was a new group. We were a young Society. We were just coming on the block. Then you had the much more established Societies of IRE. This is the period when IEEE had just been formed, so it was still going through those building stages.
You had a number of people that came in from AIEE and IRE that were the presidents, were the professionals. Now here comes this group of pip-squeaks out here. From their viewpoint it, when they looked at us, they would think, “don’t you guys know that you got to be around for a while before you can get in charge?” And we, as a small group of people who were, at that time, the EMBS leadership, began to say, we can’t get done, what we need to do. We need to figure out how do we get in here.
I have a mental picture coming in my mind of a meeting in which the IEEE President at that point, and the Executive Committee, basically met with some of us in TAB, and kind of told us, what we could do and what you can’t do. And that kind of got those of us who had moved into the Board of Directors’ positions to say “look, TAB is an important part of our IEEE, and the technical societies need this. So, we began to talk about how could we get people in leadership positions.”
As the EMB Group of the Division, came together, and we sort of said, “let’s try to get one of our people elected as Division Director.” They rolled behind me, and it was a neat effort, because people basically said, “we’re going to try to get you in, and then you have to take care of us.” So it was that kind of an agreement.
I came onto the Board of IEEE, as Division Director, in 1976 or so. It was an eye-opener for me to come onto the Board and see what the Board was going through. I started as a Division Director and then became more involved at the Board at other levels.
Vardalas:
You mention that the members of your Division pushed to get you on to the Board so that you could do things on their behalf. Now, what kind of things did they have in mind?
Gowen:
One of the things that we were looking for was the ability to have meetings and to be able to present our material.
Vardalas:
You didn’t have that at that point?
Gowen:
We were young. When we moved in, the question was how do we get in line? Because the efforts were now going to be divided. And you had somebody new coming in that wanted to be involved, and these were people who were not long, deep, into the IEEE traditional approach. So, here’s another focus for IEEE that’s going over now and looking at engineering in medicine. What did that mean for IEEE, because this was something that maybe shouldn’t be in IEEE. So, one of the very first things we had to convince people of was that we should be part of IEEE, and that sort of took on a different composure.
Vardalas:
Was that an easy thing to do?
Gowen:
It ultimately turned out that we could do it. But let me give you some perspective. In my final Ph.D. oral exam that I had, the head of the physiology department asked me to go up to the board, name the twenty-six proteins, and connect them together. So, imagine all these EEs talking about transistors and in comes a group over here that’s looking at things like that.
But we brought it together. We put on a conference that became a yearly conference. It brought together the other societies. This was a conference in cooperation with IEEE, but IEEE didn’t want to support us. We formed our own Rocky Mountain Bioengineering Society because we could not get permission to have a Chapter and activity because we were too new. We couldn’t publish, so we went to the Instrument Society of America and published there. We had to find ways of working because IEEE, over here, did not mesh on this point.
IEEE-USA, USAB
Vardalas:
Did you find it frustrating? We were talking about unemployment issues during your second year on the Board and IEEE-USA issues, so continue your story
Gowen:
There was a gentleman who was very involved politically in California, John Guerrera. John was like a great big teddy bear. He was very, very personable. He's different than many of the rest of us who were kind of reserved, conservative engineers. John was outgoing. And when I came on to the board, here’s John basically in charge of professional activities and doing all these kinds of things, and then at the board meetings, there’s a question of, well, “Do we want to be involved in politics?’ “What are you talking about, going up and lobbying the Congress? What are you talking about visiting with Senators and these people? We had that kind of system coming together and that led to what was called the good government movement.
Vardalas:
Now I didn’t hear about this. Tell me more.
Gowen:
Lots of the Board members, who came out of the technical background, industry background, were watching John who basically came from an academic kind of involvement and saying “This is not what we want IEEE to be. It’s gotten out of hand. What we have to do is go in and get some good government that would govern IEEE.” It was one of those periods in which we had some of the board saying, “we needed to get into this kind of activity taking care of our people. This is meeting our people’s needs. It’s not just government. It’s not lobbying. It’s not politics. It’s meeting where we need to be. We’re not there. We should be there.” Over the years, that’s been the history of IEEE in which things will come in and I’ve watched, like I did with EMBS and watching this here, something that rises up and the Board sort of pulls back and says wait a minute, and then, it gets evolved. So, the good government movement started to talk about going out and getting candidates for president from industry. We wanted somebody who was a very distinguished industrial leader who understood good government corporate wise.
Vardalas:
And who was that?
Gowen:
We wanted a corporate leader to come in. There were efforts to go out and talk to people that would be involved. We had talked to White. We had talked to Getting. We had talked to Les Hogan [C. Lester Hogan]. We talked to a number of people who were clearly giants in our industries. Ivan Getting came over to be the [1978 IEEE] President. Ivan did a great job. He brought a different perspective, so for a period we were sort of on a track back in those days.
Bruno [Weinschel] had developed his own company up in Gaithersburg for making wave guides and microwave devices. He was in microwaves and had his own shops where they built all of these, and Bruno was a very, very staunch--you know, in some ways, he was pressured in the sense of “this is the way you should do things.” Bruno and I got along very well together. We enjoyed each other. Bruno then became the Vice President for Professional Activities, and the Chairman of USAB [United States Activities Board]. So that was the organizing of a good government part, to switch USAB from being a political group to being a professional group. Those are the words that we used.
I followed Bruno as vice president, and when I was involved with that, IEEE had just contracted to basically get a staff and a building. We were initially over with the National Society of Professional Engineers, and we had a couple of offices up there, but we were going to move down to 19th Street. I think it was 19th Street. We had a new office area and that’s where I came in to work and started to organize USAB. We went through the question of what we needed in the way of committees. We built what pretty much is still USAB now, the four major thrusts. We talked about how to build an organization that would be a service to members. How would they build chapters? I effect, how could you have peace? We began to develop what has been the Labor Day meeting in which IEEE USAB brought together 200 people at the Camelback, a resort in Phoenix, [Arizonia]. That was a time when you brought the groups together. You basically brought in the leadership. It was a very important way of forming the active leadership of USAB and you formed your committees. We had new people who came in out of Sections because now we were reaching out to the Section side. The intent was to get representatives from the Regions and Sections, take the services that USAB would do for the profession and organize those. We had a series of meetings to do that. The Board came together, and the Board then sponsored these activities.
Leo Fanning was the Staff Director at that time, very professional. We had a number of good staff people. We went from kind of the John Guerrera days, which were good, you know. I have great respect for John, and I value what he did for IEEE because in a way, he made it a lot easier for the rest of us to come in and then try to build it. We were able to build on the foundation and the good government effort over here. We just brought it over and people then accepted that there’s a professional interest and it would work well, and so when I was involved with that activity, I was on the Board.
Then I think I got put on the Standards Board. There was some effort about well, the obvious interest in IEEE; let’s get you broadened a bit. I had background, so then I went on Professional Activities, so in the way I was on Standards for the year.
Vardalas:
But before I do say something about the tension that was part of USAB and IEEE-USA with regards to the economic interests of engineers versus other professional or technical issues related to engineering, did that finally get resolved?
Gowen:
Let me put it in another context with you. When you get a telephone call from the executive vice president of IBM asking you to come up and visit with him--that was Eric Block. At that point, I had become the President of IEEE. I went up and visited with Eric and his point was “what is IEEE doing in this business about immigration, and don’t you understand that we need people, and we want it from all over the world, so why is IEEE talking about you ought to hire Americans? We may want to hire from anywhere they’re good.” That opened a very interesting relationship. Eric Block and I became reasonably good friends over the period of time.
Vardalas:
What was the solution to that tension?
Gowen:
That tension is still here. What I point out to you is that it was inherent in the process because along with the development of USAB was the development of the international aspect. So, the IRE, international aspects that grew were continuing to grow, and they came into conflict with the sort of IEEE-USA activities. It was there early on and it’s still there in a way today. The difference today, John, is we’re now 45 percent international and pretty soon we’ll be 100 percent. But, in those days, those were the issues, and they were very real. I recall sitting in meetings with what was then the “transnational committee.” The transnational committee brought in representatives from the Regions outside of the six, which meant non-U.S., so it was transnational. It brought them together and gave them the opportunity to meet and talk about their issues. So, you had IEEE beginning to grow in the sense that you had now more dimensions to it.
When I went over and watched Standards, that was a whole other education along the way for me because I began to see how immense and how much involved we are and why we should be involved in Standards. Then I had the chance to look at the publication side. Pretty soon you recognize that IEEE is a very large business serving people who are employed in our businesses, so when you start talking about who do you need, our businesses tell us that we need everybody.
I had a similar occasion to go to Intel and Bob Noyce. IBM and Intel are at two ends of the country, and their message was basically the same thing. “We need to have access to the best brains in the world. We need to get them in, so why is IEEE taking the position of supporting hiring Americans?”
Remember, this is also the time in which the space program had collapsed because we’ve gone to the moon and now, we’re talking about the Shuttle and that special vehicle, you don’t have all of the industry involved. There were a lot of engineers going from company to company, contract to contract You start working for a contractor. When the contract opens up for rebidding, then you drop down and you start over again because if you don’t drop down your salaries, you’re going to be out of the bid. That's a brutal part of what we do, but how could we, IEEE, get involved with that?
That raised the IRA.
There was one Saturday I remember when I was Vice President of Professional Activities. I came in on a Saturday, and in the Washington, D.C. office are all these people. They were the gray power. We discovered that if engineers were to talk about needing a better retirement, people would ask why are you high paid people uncomfortable with your retirement? Engineers were viewed as being high paid. The issue was that they did not have any retirement plan. There was no portability because an engineer would typically work for five years in the contract mode and then be dropped and on the street. The contracts did not have pension portability. They did not have any long-term pensions. We found that our people were suffering because of the five year contracts, but typically you’re pension vested in seven years. We needed something different, so IEEE became involved on passing the retirement IRA.
Vardalas:
This is IEEE-USA now.
Gowen:
IEEE-USA. Oh, absolutely. You’re right, John, because it was IEEE-USA that took that on. We had a congressman from Long Island, the gentleman, Bob Borden, who helped bring together the IRA effort. We were the lobbyists for the bills and what we discovered is that we could support AARP and the seniors and their organizations and were much more credible because they could go up and talk about the retirement issues. So, IEEE went from the days of IRE and AIEE, which were totally professional. Then as we came together, this arm over here that redefined sort of professional began to look at what were the job issues and issues of individual professionals. That was a new thrust for IEEE. That’s why the good governance came in.
Vardalas:
Wasn’t it also a question of that in most of the world, there were other national engineering associations that took care of this?
Gowen:
But we didn’t.
Vardalas:
IEEE internationally is one thing. Each country within IEEE has some national group that does it. The United States was a little bit of an anomaly because it really started as AIEE.
Gowen:
Remember, with AIEE we go back to the days of [Thomas] Edison and [Alexander Graham] Bell and forming groups that would promote industrial development, and that's been the heritage of IEEE. IRE came in more with the research side, so the focus is research, societies, and global because technology is global. Business on one side is basically more country-wise and then you reached out.
It turns out that when I was at the [South Dakota] School of Mines and Technology, I made several trips to Norway because, through sort of a circumstance, the School of Mines had lots of Norwegian students. Norway had a program that was internal to the country of Norway for engineers, and there was a Norwegian engineering civil engineering society. It was Norwegian civil engineers, which was all engineers. In effect, it was like a labor union because it set the salaries for government people, and the government salaries rippled over. When you begin to see that all over Europe, there was the question of who’s IEEE and when we began to work with the societies, we would sign agreements, but we would sign agreements recognizing that they had their particular role.
We could help them with partnerships on magazines, technologies, information conferences. So, in a way, IEEE has over the globe something like IEEE-USA now, but it’s not in part of IEEE because it’s part of the country’s society. In the United States, we have no country society, particularly there’s no other large group in electrical engineers anywhere in the United States, so that was a role that fit IEEE-USA, but it’s hard for people to recognize that. So, we would go through these discussions of should we, IEEE, have something that’s kind of like a professional individual oriented circle that will take care of needs in the United States? Every other country, basically, has it. Those were the growing issues when I was on the Board. It was important to help people see [this need]. And because of what I was doing academically, I understood the politics and it allowed me try to be able to help people [understand].
IEEE Presidency
Vardalas:
Time is limited and I want to jump to your presidency. Why did you decide or why did you accept to run for [IEEE] President? As I recall, the year you ran was the first time the Board nominated two people to run for president. Is that correct?
Gowen:
There was a meeting that John Slaughter, who is the director of NSF, was speaking at. Nancy and I had known John and we were in Washington for a Board meeting. So, we went over to attend John’s luncheon, which was going to be a luncheon presentation. Some of the members of the Board came outside and said to us “you don’t want to be here.” “Why? I asked.” “Well, we’re talking about candidates for President of IEEE in the centennial year,” was the reply. I said “oh, what’s that got to do with me?” They continued, “you’re one of the candidates. But we’re debating whether we’ll have two candidates or not.” Some of them said “You know the issue is that you’re an academic. You’ve been involved with this IEEE-USA, and you don’t come from a strong industry background anymore. There’s another part of the Board that’s saying we need somebody from a strong industry [background] to be the traditional IEEE president.” That was the way that came together. By the end of the day, the Board decided there would be two candidates, and I was asked to be one of them.
Vardalas:
Who were the other candidates?
Gowen:
[Donald King], the other candidate was a strong leader of the United States in that he was the vice president for Phillips Electronics, so you had a strong industrial leader. Here’s somebody who’s been involved in lots of things. That’s how it started, John. I must tell you, on our way back home, it was very, very distressful because I’m thinking to myself “why do I want to be in an election?”
Vardalas:
What went through your mind?
Gowen:
Oh. Yes, this is the craziest thing. If you’re in an election, somebody’s going to lose, so why do you want to lose? Why do you want to be in an election, and then you might win. I’m thinking to myself, “How do I have a chance of running against a strong industrial leader?” Then I got thinking about it and told myself, “Here’s the best opportunity you’ve got. You better do something with it.”
All the things that I had done in IEEE-USA turned out to be great exposure. There were people all over who knew me, and, you know, we didn’t have the political mechanisms, but I had been involved in EE Times more than once on the front page because as the chairman of the United States Activities Committee and sort of advocating things. Irwin Feerst, who was a notorious member, was against what we were doing. That was lots of exposure. When it ended up that we were in the election, I won.
Vardalas:
Before accepting to run, did you think about how much time this is going to take? I mean, becoming President is going to take a lot of time. What job did you have at the time?
Gowen:
I was a vice president at the [South Dakota] School of Mines and Technology at the time.
Vardalas:
Could you get away from that? They would let you off?
Gowen:
My president was a civil engineer, and I was already traveling a lot for IEEE, so the discussions were “you’re going to do what!” “Who’s going to do your job here?” So, it ended up that I kept timesheets with how much time I put in for the [South Dakota] School of Mines and Technology and how much time I put in for IEEE. I was traveling a lot. We traveled to thirty-eight different countries at the time, so we did lots of traveling. But then when I was in telephone contact with my School, we didn’t have email back then, I’d call the office and say what's happening. “Well, you’ve got to call the department of this. You’ve got to do this.” So, I’d get on the phone. I did a number of things, but at the same time, I had to be able to justify doing my time at School, because the tradition was that if you were the President of IEEE, you lost your job or you were retired. You had some way that you could live.
Vardalas:
It’s all absorbing. It must have been all-encompassing.
Gowen:
We gave out lots of awards and medals. People like you when you give them awards and medals, so it was a good time.
Vardalas:
How much for the school [South Dakota School of Mines and Technology] and for IEEE?
Gowen:
I had to try to keep it balanced. I would make time. When I was home, those days were long days because that’s when I had to cover as much as I could, so that year was sort of an extremely busy year. It hasn’t gotten a lot easier anymore, but you know, you learn that you got to find out where the key points are and go work them.
Vardalas:
You’re campaigning against this fellow from Phillips. What was your campaign like? What were you running on?
Gowen:
You see, we hadn’t organized a campaign process like now where the candidates get a chance to go out and meet the Regions and all of that. I had done that. He hadn’t. We put our words into the IEEE magazines and things of that type, and that seemed to be the constraint. Those on the Board who wanted the industrialist figured the industrial side would win just because he’s an industrialist. The academics at that point were 8 percent of IEEE. There were not many academics.
Vardalas:
Why did it turn out the other way?
Gowen:
Well, because of the opportunity that I had had in being involved with activities, like, you know, I would go down to Orlando and meet with the people from NASA and have 100 in the room and talk about what their issues are. My relationship to the members was different. I was somebody with whom they were comfortable enough with in a very difficult time. These people who were losing their jobs and wondering what the IEEE’s going to do for them. On one hand, I’m talking about what we’re going to do and then when I talked to Eric Block at IBM, he would say back to me, “why are you guys doing this?” So, you have to explain it as it is, and if you’re not trying to do something strange, then people typically will recognize what you’re trying to do.
IEEE Centennial
Vardalas:
In the days leading up to the vote, what did you say about your goals as President? What did you want to achieve? Did you explicitly say anything?
Gowen:
At that point we were focused on the centennial.
Vardalas:
So, your focus was to make the best of the centennial?
Gowen:
It was really a campaign to be the President of the centennial celebration.
Vardalas:
What did you propose to do?
Gowen:
I had been involved with several of the preplanning activities, so I would talk about the importance of our history. I talked about why is IEEE, what it is and what was its heritage? I focused on that area, and those words resonated with people. I didn’t make campaign speeches. I wrote letters to people. I asked for their support, but I didn’t have a real mass campaign.
Vardalas:
Did you have a clear conception of how what things you wanted to initiate during the centennial?
Gowen:
We had talked about in the process of the centennial coming up. There was a lot of pre-discussion at the Board level, and we had a gentleman who came out from IEEE, and I’m seeing his face right now and his name will come back to me, who is a tremendous visionary for how could you put on events and activities. He gave us lots and lots of effort and I’m embarrassed that the name is escaping from me at this point, but it’ll come back. But in the whole process, we were talking about how could we in effect do the real intensive celebration of IEEE and what it would be. There were early discussions about having a history activity. We didn’t have one then, so the thought was, “well, could you bring together a History Center and could you make that work out?”
Vardalas:
Did that come under your events?
Gowen:
Yes. That is because it’s still involved with the history. We basically came together, and he had a little office in New York on 42nd, 45th Street in the headquarters. We talked about what would be the appropriate recognition of the giants that made what we were. As soon as I became elected, as President-Elect, we shifted into high gear. While I was running for President, I was basically supporting the planning discussions. Then zing, you’re on and you’ve got a year now to basically get everything up and running, and that year was a very busy year.
Vardalas:
Did you conceive of the centennial as celebration among engineers or outreach to the general public about what engineering is about?
Gowen:
The discussion at that point was to figure out how do we recognize the leaders who were, in large majority, industry leaders. How could we bring together the broad recognition that here is something special for IEEE and what could you reach out with?
[Through] some of the activities I had done with USAB [United States Activities Board] I understood how to do some of that. For instance, one of the press conferences we had was at the [National] Press Club in Washington, D.C., and I thought, you know, it’d be a small group. When we came in, it was packed. I was amazed that it was packed. The reason it was packed was a very interesting release that occurred, because the Harris Polling organization had polled engineers about what did they think computers could do in education, and the answer back was universal. This is not the way computers should be used. They ought to be used for real education. So, that was an issue, and that was the question that I spoke to.
What is the importance of K-12 education? What does it mean in the future and how could you use computers to enforce it? That got headlines across the press because it was current. That sort of helped us appreciate that if you’re going to be involved, people don’t necessarily want to know about what was the newest something you did. What are you doing for me? We began to talk about what was done. We started putting together poster boards and we tried to figure a way that in every airport, we could put an exhibit to catch the attention of all the travelers.
We began to put material out to the Sections, early in our development just like you’re doing with the GHN [Global History Network is now Engineering and Technology Wiki, ETHW]. We were using what we could that day. I remember I had a civil engineering professor who was very innovative, and I went to him and said I need a frame in which to put posters.
How could we reach out and make the presence of IEEE felt? One of the things that I did in that period was a brochure. The intent was to have IEEE instantly recognizable in the brochure. We had an artist in New York that would prepare it and when I would come in, we would go over the brochure, and I finally got him to ask, “what in your mind are the technologies?”
We had a brochure that had a globe on it because we were global and then he put on montages. You had space program. You had antennas. You had all the things that go there. I tested it. I’d give it to somebody, and when they were just opening up to look, I’d take it away and say, what did you see. It was interesting because they saw what resonated with their idea of what’s going on in the press. What’s technology? We used that brochure.
Vardalas:
It’s still being used.
Gowen:
Yes, we used that. We took that to Washington when we would go visit. We’d hand it out [to] industry when we visited. Whenever we gave out the brochure there was an instant recognition of IEEE. That’s how we began to reach out to the public because you needed to carry forward what’s IEEE in their terms.
Vardalas:
Now during that course of events there was a lot of participation and different Sections, Societies, Regions got involved in this, you know, this year leading up to it. Thinking back, were there any lasting effects of the centennial celebration that carried over, that had momentum after it was over? For example, I’ve heard that the idea of Sections Congress started with the centennial.
Gowen:
Associated with the meetings that we had, we tried to bring together a half dozen very large celebrations, and as much as we do with the 125th. There was the idea of a large dinner, but in preparation for that, you would do meetings and people come together. They enjoyed coming together.
There were some interesting things that emanated from the centennial. In 1983, the year I was President-Elect, I led a delegation of sixteen engineers to China. We went for three weeks, a long delegation time. It was the follow on of a series of delegations each year that we would go to China, and on behalf of IEEE share technologies. I recall an engineer in the back of the room standing up and saying what are you going to do when we start producing things cheaper than you, and I made a comment about quality. Little did I understand that he also understood quality.
Before I left China, I met with the leaders in China and said this is the last delegation. I said “there’ll not be another delegation. There won’t be one next year.” I said furthermore, “you’re ready to be a Chapter. So, if you want to have IEEE’s involvement, you are going to do it like everybody else. You’re going to be a Chapter.”
That started the Beijing Chapter. Eric Herz and I went over in 1984 and we signed the agreement in China to basically have the first Section in China, and with that, there were a lot of questions about well, how many fellows do we get if we join, and the answer was none. Your Fellows will have to apply. Now, you have to recognize you have tremendous capability for Fellows. You will have Fellows, but the Fellows will come on their own behalf, because that’s how we do Fellows. Well, can we pay for all of our members? We have members as individuals. They will not be Chinese members from the China government. They’ll be individual members who happen to live in China. So, we did a lot of that discussion, but that was all formative that ultimately led--. Now we have seven Sections in China. Now that it’s growing we’re looking at more Sections coming, but it took a while for that to kind of seed.
This occurred in 1983 and 1984, and it was all part of the centennial. When we were doing the centennial, it was easy to say to the people in China we are now 100 years old. We need you to join us. You are part of us, so you don’t need us to come over here and share just technology with this. You can have our conferences, you can have people coming, we’re all ready to share, and that broke the ice. The centennial was a good way of beginning to get some of the changes which were very hard to do otherwise because you’re celebrating a “Century of Giants.” You’re celebrating technology, and people resonated with it, John. They were ready to do things.
Vardalas:
Were there any things you can recall?
IEEE Foundation
Gowen:
I was also in the centennial year that I was the President of the IEEE Foundation. Now it’s different than it was then because in that year, we had money that had been given, I think we had about $2 million, and we were talking about what kind of projects can we do.
Vardalas:
You mean you were the Foundation President the same time you were the IEEE President. It was the same person?
Gowen:
Yes. That’s the way we worked it then. We would meet for lunch twice a year, and over the lunch hour, we talked about what we would do with the $2 million. It was never intended to give it out for projects. It was intended what would IEEE do with the $2 million to grow.
Vardalas:
I see. Let me just digress a little bit. As [IEEE] President, you had to oversee discussions at the Board. How would you characterize your role as president of the Board?
Gowen:
I believe that the best way you do a meeting of the Board is you recognize that everybody who’s there is there because they want to be. Now, they may be there because they have an opinion they want to express, or they may be there because they have an axe to grind. Whatever it is, they’re there because they want to be there, so what you need to be able to do is give everybody the chance to say what they want to say and do it in a way that you don’t blow up, because those days, we would do the Board meeting in a day.
We would have pre-Board meetings; TAB [Technical Activities Board] would meet, and RAB [Regional Activities Board] would meet and those were the basic two meetings because the other boards met separately. Then from that, you would come on to the Board. You would have the Division Directors and the Regional Directors basically caucusing and lobbying together, and we do that still now. When they came in, they would have their opinions, but we were small enough that everybody sort of knew each other. We still had twenty regional TABs. We had the presidents in, so it was basically just a bit smaller than it is now. It wasn’t dramatically different. We didn’t have the two computer science people. But out of all of that, it was a time of basically trying to respect each other in the process and I think that’s still where the Board is. I stuck with Robert’s Rules of Order pretty strongly because that was the way I’d be able to ensure that everybody had a chance. The attitude I had about it, my rule there was to make sure that everybody in the room would have an opportunity. When they left, they felt like the time at the Board was a worthwhile time. That was the attitude I had, and I still believe that to be the right attitude.
Vardalas:
Did you find it difficult leaving your opinions in the back when you got in there? It’s a challenge to leave your opinions behind.
Gowen:
I knew the people. I knew the people there, so if I had an opinion, I could share the opinion with people who were there. If they agreed, they’d take it up. If they didn’t, they wouldn’t. When you use Robert’s Rules of Order, if you’re going to be involved, somebody else has got to take over the meeting, and for the most part, my job was to just bring the meeting together and recognize that it would fly as it could.
Vardalas:
Are there any things that stick in your mind in your presidency that you regret you weren’t able to do? Was there some project you wanted to start, but never did? Is there anything that sticks in your mind?
Gowen:
There was an interesting event that occurred in 1984 when I was the President. In the summer of that year in June, I got a telephone call from the office of the Governor of South Dakota. The governor basically told me that he had a job for me, and my reaction was “oh”. The governor wanted me to take on an issue that was very critical in the state with the university. Citibank came to the state and brought its credit card center. The governor and Citibank talked about taking one of the schools that had existed and make it a corporate school. It turned out that it didn’t work the way they thought. It ended up being a blow up.
I was asked to go over and become the president of the school and basically build it. All I could think is, I don’t know that I want to do that, and I said Governor, “I’m going to go to South America for two weeks.” The whole time Nancy and I are trying to figure out how do we get out of doing this because it wasn’t really something that was high on my list. I was enjoying being involved in IEEE. I wasn’t thinking far ahead because I figured this is just an issue and somebody else would take care of it. We came back and the governor had his airplane waiting for us. Basically, we came back and flew over and looked at the place, and before another week went by, I was the president of the school.
I went from being IEEE President in the year and doing all of the things to get IEEE ready to suddenly finding out that I had another job. Instantly, I’m going somewhere else to be president of the school. So, that was August. In the remaining months, I was very busy as President of IEEE and then taking on another job.
When I opened up the yearbook at the meeting of the parents that were coming in to celebrate their children in school there were pictures of people around with signs sort of lobbying. There’s a rally here. This is what I was sent over to try to see what can you do about it? We had to stay there three years. It was a good time. We liked the school. We were going to stay there, but the school that I had been at began to have some problems with the board of regents. One day, I got tapped on the shoulder and guess what I had another change. So, for the times I’ve been involved in IEEE, I’ve had other responsibilities and that’s put me in--
Vardalas:
But you don’t think that you’ve left any big things unfinished when you ended as President of IEEE?
Gowen:
If I look at the things that were left undone, we were struggling to be international, but the centennial helped that. We were out doing things and it brought into the countries the presence of IEEE, and that was good. Even today, when I go out and visit in the Regions, there are people who are still there who go back and remember when I came out as IEEE President for centennial events in 1984. People would say you gave an award, a medal, but I didn’t do it, IEEE did it.
At the time there was also the question of where was TAB? What was TAB going to do? TAB was growing. It had the same kind of growing pains that we experienced with EMBS back as we were forming, but now it was getting bigger, and the growing pains were a challenge. TAB was, in many ways and still is, the great big aspect of IEEE, and with our Society involvements and all of the members who are associated with the Societies, that’s a major, major part of IEEE. It’s the backbone of what we look at, so emerging and seeing how that would emerge were critical.
The issues that were very, very much on the agenda of the Board was money. We went through lots and lots of discussion about budgets. The income which IEEE now enjoys from its publications was just emerging, and it was early in that whole process. IEEE was a very large organization then, but nowhere as compared to the size that it is now. The business complexities then were relatively simple because you had the general manager’s office. You [also] had your assistant that basically ran the publications and the Standard side, so it was a small group of four people coming together. You could basically talk about what IEEE was. It’s much larger now.
Vardalas:
Wasn’t the IEEE Computer Society another key issue?
Gowen:
Back in 1984, the [IEEE] Computer Society was emerging. Martha Sloan was the [1984] President of the IEEE Computer Society.
Vardalas:
I interviewed her, yes.
Gowen:
She was a very dynamic person who had a good vision. People liked her and would work with her, so the Computer Society was very much running forward. ACM [Association of Computing Machinery] was there. It was the competition between ACM and the Computer Society and attempts were made to try to figure out how did you get to basically the industry versus the academic side. ACM became almost the academic side for math and computer science departments, and IEEE became the rest of the computer industry, and so you saw that evolve. That’s where it started.
Vardalas:
How did you respond to a comment like this which I’ve heard people in the [IEEE] Computer Society say, “We are not engineers”? These are people with some responsibility. That reflected to me a kind of tension between how Computer Society people feel they fit into IEEE. Did you ever experience that kind of tension?
Gowen:
We were the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers. We would use the word Institute as being the first way of recognizing that it wasn’t just electrical engineers. In fact, our roots go back to the electrical side, but the roots have broadened out. The branches are different. We found ourselves stumbling over the question of how could one reach out to computer scientists, to the physicists, to the people that were involved because out of the TAB background, out of the IRE background, those who were very, very prominent in the development of our technologies. And the noble science type of people, the people who were very, very much the folks that we were focusing upon. In the “Century of Giants”, we focused on the engineers, electrical. There were others that were in there. We found ourselves trying to stumble over the question of what are we, and that started to emerge in a different way. An early piece of it was the USAB activity out here because that was kind of before we did computer science. We were just getting started. Then computer scientists came in, and they sort of had the same sort issues because they were not in mainstream of what IEEE institute is. Then as we began to recognize that number wise and the leadership and recognition of technology wise, here is this group that isn’t necessarily all engineers because we found the engineers doing applications and activities. The science, the invention, the new pieces are coming over here and how do you give them appropriate recognition?
We even see that still today with the President of IEEE, John Vig, who’s a physicist. He points out physicists are in IEEE. We struggled to make that come together. The change of going from the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers to IEEE was again another major recognition of how we cope with that, so it’s like IBM, you know, itty bitty machines or whatever he would say, but that’s not it, okay? You use short words and that gives people comfort, so it’s IEEE.
Now with GHN [now ETHW], we’re talking about partnerships as we go out and open it up for more societies to be involved. How do we give them a place that they’re willing to call their own and at the same time know that it’s IEEE who basically built it for them? You have to change your attitude, so when you open up more and say this is a family of all people, that’s inclusive as opposed to here are the given ones and the rest of you can maybe join. So, it’s a struggle. We had that in the centennial. We still have it today.
Vardalas:
How would you characterize the relationship of the [IEEE] Foundation to IEEE historically? What is the importance of this relationship and how has it changed? What does the Foundation mean for IEEE as an organization?
Gowen:
John, I mentioned earlier that the IEEE Foundation had a small amount of money back in 1984.
Vardalas:
How did it come into being?
Gowen:
It came into being because we had an early bequest. We came to recognize that there were leaders like the Goldsmiths talking about putting money in, but they did not want their money to go into the operation of IEEE. So, in the early stages, we recognized the need for a Foundation to have the ability to accept money and protect it from going into the operation of IEEE. That’s basically how the Foundation concept started.
Then as IEEE was going through its IRS involvement, there were those that worried about IEEE lobbying in the United States. If you’re doing that, then maybe you shouldn’t be a C5 or a C3 or what should you be, and so at one point, IEEE was not in a charitable foundation status.
We kept the Foundation going and realized the need to build it. That brought about the idea of a Development Office that would raise money. When I was getting ready to retire from the university, the IEEE Foundation folks contacted me and asked would I have an interest in the Foundation and would I consider putting time in helping the Foundation grow.
You know, the IEEE has been my life. Now that I was coming out of the day-to-day operation as president of the university, I could devote time to the Foundation. I agreed, but then the state of South Dakota had a gold mine close, and the governor asked if I would help get a gold mine to become a national lab. I then delayed coming over to [the] Foundation for two years. Finally, the Foundation people said to me, are you coming, or aren’t you? I came over and that was 2005. I was asked to be the president and the goal was to build the Foundation in a Foundation mode. They wanted me to apply my university fund raising experience to build the Foundation. That’s how I started. The purpose was to reach out to donors. We have donors who designate where the money will be spent. The Foundation then ensures that the money goes to where it was designated. You raise money for a particular use. If there’s somebody that needs money for something that we value, we will give them the money. You do it altruistically, but you also do it because in fact it resonates with who you are and what you want. We did surveys, we developed, we brought people on board and now we’re getting ready for the first time to really go on a campaign.
At the Board meeting coming up, we will be talking about a capital campaign to raise money for the new SMART Grid. The Power and Energy Society recognizes that this nation alone will need 7,000 engineers over the next ten years to work on the SMART Grid. We’ve not really concentrated on the alternative energies or the things that would require a new distribution system or new way of working our power industry. So, the Foundation then is getting prepared to go out to mount a campaign, and we’re talking about raising $4 million a year.
Vardalas:
What will you do with that money?
Gowen:
That money would go for scholarships and then to develop programs and develop curriculum. That’s a role of IEEE and the Foundation’s role, then, is to walk along with the Society and help raise the money. The mechanics of raising the money is to go out and find out who has the money that they’ll put in. What do the people who have money feel? Where do they want their money to go? Then you can go back and put a campaign together and raise it.
The other thing that we’re working on is humanitarian technology, and that has been a major, major thrust in that IEEE really provides the support to members where their workplace is, but we live outside of the workplace. We have a life that deals with people, so the humanitarian technology side really comes together with our members. We’re seeing a tremendous interest. The issue is how does IEEE organize to be able to go forward and support humanitarian technology efforts? We’ve had a program in TAB on humanitarian technology. That was a good start. It’s showing us things.
Now it’s time to build a communication link globally, to get the needs, to be able to support our members. We’re at that stage now where we’re going to go to the New Initiatives Committee and ask for money so that the IEEE Foundation can support raising money for the new humanitarian technologies. One of the things we’re asking for is to get the Board of Directors of IEEE to put up $3 million, sort of as match money, so we can raise more. Our goal will be to raise $10 million; money that can support projects and that can support staff so that you have staff that will really make this work and get it together to be able to reach out to the countries.
Vardalas:
How do you see these two feeding off each other, IEEE as an organization and the Foundation? What ties them together?
Gowen:
Legally, we’re separate for a very special purpose.
Vardalas:
For governance purposes, you’re separate, though?
Gowen:
Absolutely. But the Foundation only exists for one reason, IEEE. Its sole reason is to basically help IEEE do what IEEE does.
Vardalas:
Has it been articulated what specifically falls under the IEEE Foundation’s area of help? Have you carved that out yet?
Gowen:
All right, let me ask you--keep that thought. Don’t lose that point because that’s a very vital point. If you’re a donor, what do you give money to? You give money to activities that resonate with your interest, so if IEEE has a carved out area over here and if there are donors that see that as an area they want to give money to they’ll give money. But if they don’t, then that carved out area over here will sit, so one of the issues is what’s important, and working in the workplace. There are many things that we talk about that are needed, but they’re not necessarily the things that people will give money to.
A large effort that has to be held within IEEE. The New Initiatives Committee of IEEE funds new projects. Before that occurred, it was the Foundation that funded new projects. The Foundation then served to give money to IEEE to start something new. The Foundation now has money that it can make available for special progress, Sections Congress for example. We give grants, so anybody can apply to get a grant. We’ve come together with the Life Members Committee. Our Grants Committee is thus a joint committee of the Foundation and Life Members.
Life Members like to put money in for student services, student activities, and student projects. They get the chance to take those grants and use them. The Foundation looks at the other grants as a whole. We’re moving to recognize that people give money because they want something to go. The humanitarian technology effort is the first major fund that the Foundation will sponsor alone. We have funds for all the other Societies, but we’re going to sponsor that because that will be an IEEE fund and as IEEE sort of carves out what its humanitarian efforts will be. But the IEEE efforts still have to resonate with the potential donors, so the Foundation then has a role of working with IEEE. You look at the donors and help identify where the donors will put money. Then you go over to IEEE and help say, “Here are places where people will put money. You like the money. Let’s bridge it.”
Vardalas:
Who is responsible for the stewardship of this money? In other words, is the [IEEE] Foundation going to just hand it over to these projects or is there going to be a good steward that makes sure the money is well spent?
Gowen:
The Foundation’s principle purpose legally and operationally is to make sure that if you put money in, the money gets used for what you put it in for. If we do a humanitarian technology fund and we describe what that fund is, that fund has to really mirror what IEEE is going to do. It has to be an easy flow. If it flows easily, then you line it up so that the donor, who sees where the money will go, gets excited about putting the money in, and knows that the Foundation will then be there to make sure in an oversight mode that that money gets used. Now, does that have to be difficult? No, because in fact, once you set up the goals and the places it’s going to go, the money will be used in IEEE. The money will be used for members. It will be used for non-members. IEEE is talking about being able to do things like give micro grants to take some concept of innovation that comes up, get it ready to go out and be sustainable economically.
I am now working on an initiative with IBM, who in turn is working with the country of Bangladesh to get something started that basically would be able to help the power problems in Bangladesh. That’s a real humanitarian technology issue because there’s not enough electricity. When you have no reserve capacity and lights have to go out during the day, you need something special, so photovoltaics look very important. IEEE has got a lot of interest in that. Can they do photovoltaics? Here’s an example of a project that will succeed only because the country is going to make sure it succeeds. They have to, though, so you’re providing assistance. There will be industries that will build what has to be there so it’s sustainable economically.
Vardalas:
Would you say, then, in summary, from the really big picture that one cannot write a good history of IEEE if one doesn’t include the Foundation as part of what IEEE is about?
Gowen:
The Foundation really has come together in the last years, John, because early on, it was viewed as a place that you could put a little money in and it was a good place to park money. We have something like 130 or 113 or 114 funds. We have awards. Education awards and history are our major goals, so you put money into it. Look at the history side, which you’re involved with. We put money over in the history society [IEEE History Center]. Donors put money in. IEEE puts money in. You know, the new initiative has supported the GHN [now ETHW] which you’ve done such a great job with. All of that to come together is important. But you know, you can see that. Now, from a perspective of what the role of the Foundation is, the Foundation has value when it helps IEEE do what it needs to do, and so the real value of the Foundation is coming when we go out to the Power and Energy Society. They want $4 million for scholarships to be given on behalf of the industry and that’s a role for IEEE. Here’s a leading Society, our oldest, impacting IEEE, and our oldest Society that sees that what he can help the whole country grow, the people - - is to go with the smart grid, and to really do the smart grid unless you have people, you can’t make it happen.
Vardalas:
You’re telling me that the Foundation has only in the last few years really gotten better at doing this. Are you saying that, in the last two or three years it’s built up a structure to do this?
Gowen:
I’m hesitant because it’s not just the Foundation. In other words, you can’t, you can’t do it alone. It has to be a bridge.
