Oral-History:Richard Gowen (2011)
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.
Interview
INTERVIEWEE: Richard Gowen
INTERVIEWER: Michael Geselowitz
DATE: 23 September 2011
PLACE: Piscataway, NJ
Early life and education, Rutgers
Geselowitz:
This is Michael Geselowitz of the IEEE History Center. I'm in Piscataway, New Jersey, with Richard J. Gowen conducting an oral history interview. Dick, I'd like, if you would, to begin at the beginning, and tell us how you got interested in pursuing a technical career.
Gowen:
Early on, I had an interest in things that you could do, and I started by making a boat. I was fascinated that you could do things, and I had an uncle who was involved with the merchant marine, so the thought of being able to go out on the sea in a boat also fascinated me.
I didn't really have money to make a boat, but I took tin cans and literally cut them out, laid them flat, got a soldering iron, and made a boat, a good-sized boat that I could take over at Johnson's Park and put it onto the lake and sail it.
Geselowitz:
Where was this?
Gowen:
I grew up right here in New Brunswick, New Jersey.
Geselowitz:
In New Brunswick, right across the river from where we are conducting this interview?
Gowen:
In New Brunswick, right across the river. This is where we came from, and I enjoyed this part of New Jersey and all the activities that were available. The lake was fascinating, and I made the boat. That was the first technical thing I did. Then I did woodwork, and I worked on a lot of projects. Then when I got into high school, I had a chemistry teacher who sort of urged me on in my technical interests. In the process, I made a xylophone that would work electrically; a musical instrument that you would play across, and it would go ding, ding, ding. It was one of the very first things I made that was electrical and that got my interest going in what you might do electrically. I heard about electrical engineering at Rutgers [University], and that led me to come over to Rutgers as a university student, and to enter electrical engineering.
Geselowitz:
What year was that?
Gowen:
That was in 1953. I started in at EE [electrical engineering] at Rutgers, and it was an exciting time to come out of high school and come over to the university. We had big issues, like could you buy a slide rule, what was the best slide rule you could buy, and how cheaply could you buy it? I think slide rules were $20 or something at that point in time, but that was my start of being an electrical engineer.
Geselowitz:
And was there any particular course or project that stands out in your mind as being particularly exciting or influential in your career?
Gowen:
Electrical engineering at that time was still very hands-on. You learned how to draw. You learned how to go into the machine shop and make things. You began to see that you had to create, and there were ways that you created. I enjoyed engineering very much.
My senior design project turned out to be something that in a way started my whole professional trajectory. In those days, we were beginning to talk about computers, and [Claude] Shannon had talked about how you basically use computers to do communication. The thought that you could program something to function was fairly new. It was even in the popular press that there was this new device called a computer. That fascinated me.
For my senior design project, I proposed making a Maze-Mastering Mouse because I realized that it was a step-by-step logical development that could be programmed. I asked to do that, and the faculty agreed that it sounds like an interesting project. Well, it turned out that I went down in the laboratory, they gave me a section of the lab, and I literally made a Maze-Mastering Mouse. I put it up on chairs and stood inside as I was putting it together because it was relays. We did not have transistors; those were just starting. I chose not to put vacuum tubes in, so it was a relay device, and it was large! On the top of it, it had a glass plate that I put a connector into. I made a maze, and then I put this mouse into it that was tied in with an XYZ plotter type as it moved around the maze. A DC generator had to run the motor, and Westinghouse, which supported Rutgers engineering, supported me by giving me the equipment. I had this massive set of relays. I wrote a paper on it and entered my first paper contest. I started it in September, and the paper contest was at Brooklyn Poly at the beginning of the year. I didn't get far enough. I didn't have this thing working yet, so I took second place in the paper contest. Well, Mike, second place didn't really sit well for me, so I came back and finished it, and I made this Maze-Mastering Mouse.
The project turned out to have a very interesting benefit because it came time to graduate, and I started to look around for where I might find a job. I had several interviews, including some very good interviews in the process, but I was fascinated by this company called RCA that was down in Princeton. And, as we do as students, I cut a lab and went down and had an interview at RCA. I didn't quite know what to expect, but I ended up going through a series of oral interviews, a half hour each, two engineers at a time. I had never had such an interview. They probed everything, and when I started answering, they had another question ready for me. It turned out that the whole idea of making a Maze-Mastering Mouse was especially fascinating to these people. Here's this college student who didn't know what he was really getting into but was able to do it, and that ended up giving me an opportunity to go to work for RCA. Then they asked me what kind of salary offers are you getting, and they gave me the top salary that I had been offered. I enjoyed going down there, and as a student fresh out of school to come into a research environment was very exciting for me.
Geselowitz:
What year was that?
Gowen:
That was in 1957. I graduated from Rutgers in 1957. I went down and started working at RCA, and while I was at Rutgers, I had been involved in the [Air Force] ROTC program. I enjoyed the ROTC program. I went from the undergraduate two years to the senior level advanced program. I was in charge of helping the drill team. I actually led the drill team. At that time, I could flip around rifles and do all those things. It's the kind of thing you could think of a drill team would do, so it was a very active time. I enjoyed it well.
When I graduated, I didn't really expect that I'd go to active duty because this was post Korean War. The international climate was cooling down. We were now starting to get concerned as a nation about what was going to happen in the Cold War, but there didn't appear to be a lot of interest in bringing people to active duty.
I was going off to RCA and really getting excited about a new career. Then I got one of these letters, and it said, “greetings and salutations,” and I was called to active duty. There were ten of us that were called to active duty as electrical engineers. We didn't know what was going on at the time, but what was occurring nationally was the Russians had developed an airplane, a bomber, that could go under our radar. The United States was doing gap fillers. Where there would be a drop in the land, and an airplane could fly through, we were putting radars there. We were putting them all over the world. The ten of us had expected we were going to be in security service. Turned out that there were two State-side assignments, and I happened to be fortunate enough to have a choice, and that took me up to Montana. I came from here, about forty miles from New York and went to Montana, forty miles from the nearest small logging town. Quite a change, but it was a great opportunity and that is what led me from one thing to another.
Air Force
Geselowitz:
What was in Montana, a station that was part of the North American radar network?
Gowen:
Yes. It was just on the border of the United States. We were six miles from Canada, six miles from Idaho, and miles from everything else, but it was an interesting involvement. It was at the top of a hill, and we lived down below. It was a post-graduate course in human relations that I came in as a young officer and suddenly found myself involved because of being in the electronics area. I was the communications and electronics officer and suddenly owned all the equipment on this site. At first, I was a little bit taken aback, but in the process, it helped me get a better perspective of how you do things, and how do you work with people. In engineering, we're pretty focused as undergraduates on technology, and suddenly you come into this new world where there are all kinds of things happening, not only from the point of view of technology, but from the people side. It gave me tremendous opportunity to begin to kind of understand part of life that I really hadn't been exposed to.
Geselowitz:
Were you married yet at that time?
Gowen:
Yes.
Geselowitz:
And was your wife also from New Jersey?
Gowen:
Nancy and I went to high school together and Nancy was ahead of me in high school. I first met Nancy at a football game. She was a twirler who twirled the batons around, and I was one of those people who carried the flag. We sort of looked over at each other and sort of said, “hmm,” and that's how we met. We ultimately married and have been together now for a few years.
Geselowitz:
How did she feel about relocating to Montana?
Gowen:
We had a choice. We could have gone to Panama City, Florida, or go to Montana. In those years, it was just at the start of the civil rights movement. Growing up in New Jersey we'd been used to an environment that is multicultural. At one point we went down to Mississippi as part of school, and it was the first time that we began to recognize that there are segregation issues and related issues that we weren't comfortable with.
Frankly, we made the choice to go to Montana rather than going to Panama City together. When we got to Montana, we understood better, and we had a good time. It was her choice to come to Montana. We ended up having to buy a trailer to go to Montana, so we had this large trailer that we lived in. It was a great experience young in life. We had our son, and it was all coming together nicely. Then as other opportunities arise, you sort of say, hmm, that's interesting, but let's move on. It was a good time, so we enjoyed that.
Geselowitz:
How long were you there?
Gowen:
In Montana, we were there for about eighteen months. Now, while we were in Montana, I had the chance to propose to the Air Force that they sort of do something different in the way they were building the gap fillers and conducting the gap filler activity. Here's a second lieutenant who's basically telling NORAD, maybe you want to think about doing it this other way. Whatever it was, they gave me the chance. In effect, I was able to do something very unusual. I completely rebuilt a radar station as a young officer and doing it out miles from everywhere sort of helped me get things together. I understood how motors work. I understood how diesel generators work. I began to get all that education, so for me, it was just a continuation of my technological education and learning how to put it all together.
Then one day there was a notice about the Air Force Academy coming into being, and I thought that could be interesting. I wonder what that's like, so I applied to become a member of the faculty. The Air Force Academy required that you have at least a master's degree to be on the faculty. I said, “Well, that's interesting. They're going to sponsor me for a master's degree,” which they did, and that took me to Iowa State University in Ames, Iowa. I didn't know what Iowa State was, and I didn't know where Ames, Iowa, was. We're just coming from New Jersey. When we went there, I became involved in computers. What I had started with [Claude] Shannon's work with the Maze-Mastering Mouse, I was going to go into computers and continue to work on that line. That's what I was excited about and great opportunities.
Geselowitz:
Was [John Vincent] Atanasoff still at Iowa State at that time?
Gowen:
Atanasoff had been there earlier, and had done his early work on computers, but, honestly, I didn't hear about Atanasoff while I was at Iowa State. The people I was engaged with weren't involved in the same areas that he had been involved in. This was electrical engineering, and his work was across the street in physics. The street was not very wide, but it was very wide from the point of view of what did you know.
I was involved in the Electrical Engineering Department, and then I'd heard about this new program coming in called Biomedical Engineering. The Air Force was just beginning to talk about space because in 1957, the Russians launched Sputnik, and Sputnik changed the way this nation thought of itself and its programs. When I was at Iowa State, we were in that process of basically doing this kind of change. The Air Force was talking about the possibility of having a manned space program, and that really excited me. I figured, maybe the thing to do here, if there’s going to be a manned space program to put people in space, is to get involved with biomedical engineering, which would be interesting, so I changed and went to biomedical engineering. By a fluke of timing, I probably ended up being the first biomedical graduate in the United States. I don't know if anybody else in the world had a degree program at that time.
Geselowitz:
I think it was one of the first programs.
Gowen:
It was the first program. The Air Force put me through there, I finished my master's in about two years, and then I did a Ph.D. in another year. I finished…Actually, as a matter of fact, I didn't finish. I hadn’t spent enough time at Iowa State to graduate, so when I finished my Ph.D. thesis and turned it in, they said, “you've only been here thirty months. You've got to spend another three months.” Those three months turned out to be a very interesting opportunity because on the biomedical side I had taken a lot of interest in the cardiovascular system.
My thesis had to do with blood pressure. I had come up with a design that you could take your finger and measure blood pressure off your finger. If you've ever been involved on a treadmill for exercise work, your hands are moving. It's tough to put a cuff on and measure blood pressure. But I developed a way that you could go in, and you could measure it off your finger, and I got a patent on that. It was the first patent on measuring finger blood pressure, like you'll find things done now.
Geselowitz:
It's now a relatively common technology.
Gowen:
Relatively common, but back then this was brand new stuff. From a systems point of view, a major question for me was how was the cardiovascular system working? During the additional three months that I had at Iowa State that I needed to get ready to graduate, I ended up doing laboratory work. I worked on animals. I worked on dogs, and I had the opportunity to do experiments. An electrical engineer in a veterinary department basically working on animals in the laboratory was a little unusual, but it was wonderful for me because it gave me a perspective of how we function as people, how animals function, and what the vasomotor system was. I didn't know at the time how important this work would turn out to be, but it was fascinating.
I graduated, went to the Air Force Academy, started teaching, and got involved in instrumentation. As a matter of fact, the first thing I did as a researcher when I went to the Air Force Academy, was make an instrument in pill form about the size of my thumb. That pill was very important from the point of view of nuclear activity because we didn't really understand yet what was happening with radiation sickness. The folks at Sandia National Labs were doing experiments on sheep and donkeys, trying to understand how radiation sickness would occur. This pill measured temperature. They put it in the animals, and ultimately, as they exposed them to a radiation environment, they would know what was happening. That was my first experiment, and I was beginning to look at things.
I was just a young faculty member. I had cadets. I got engaged, and everybody was excited about what I was doing. Then I got a call from NASA, from one of the people that I'd gone to school with, one of the graduate students at Iowa State, who had told NASA about this fellow who was biomedical. I was invited to come down and visit with the physicians that were involved in the medical side of the Gemini program. There were three stages in the space program, Mercury, Gemini, and Apollo. In the Gemini program I came in to be the person who would be their clinical engineer. Now, we didn't have those terms yet, but that's in effect what I was doing.
I went back to the Air Force Academy with a contract for $37,000 to basically do some research. I didn't know that you don't just walk in with a contract and ask for everything, but that’s what I did and that's how it started. It ended up that I had a laboratory at the Academy that we worked for twelve years with NASA. It was a quick response lab. If something occurred in the space program that there was a question about, and they needed someone to look at it, since we were already in the government, it was relatively easy to make a phone call and turn on funding so that we could do some research on it.
I helped build a facility that in effect was a room that had three sides to it that were all glass. If you looked from inside, it was mirrors, but outside, you could see into it. What we did in that room was something called a tilt table. It lays flat, and then suddenly you tilt it at 70 degrees, and your legs become like bags, and your body just interacts like space flight, like weightlessness. That was an exciting thing that we did, and out of that we developed instrumentation that ultimately was used on Apollo 15. There was a problem that came by about the arrhythmias that occurred in subjects, so we did some very interesting development, and I made a computer that I could take out and put on board ship.
The issue that was very important at that time, Mike, was that when you build this computer, you're going to put it in an environment that is a very, very heavy, with stray currents. It would be a little awkward if you were to put an astronaut in, and you did something to the astronaut. You had to find a way of doing it. I made an optical link. It was one of the very first times that anyone did a diode detector optical link. I did an EKG on the astronaut, and then ultimately ran an x-ray machine to look at whether there'd be atrophy in cardiac muscle. We were concerned about whether your muscles will atrophy being in space, especially if the cardiac muscle would. We didn't know. We were just at the early stages, and we were developing it.
The opportunities to be engaged in the program were good because for the last six-man space flights, I was part of the medical launch and recovery team. We would take this computer instrument down, and the day before we were going to send the crew off, we did the tests at the Kennedy Space Center. They took off, and the next time I saw them was in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. All that involvement was pretty good stuff to do.
At one point, I had become so interested in the space program that they were asking for science astronauts, and I was chosen to be one of the Air Force’s eleven nominees. That was in December, and then I took the kids ice skating in January, and ten days later, I couldn't walk. It was a career-changing time for me, and I re-evaluated how I was involved with the research and development for the space program.
A good part of my life has been associated with that kind of cutting-edge research. Ultimately, we sent people to the moon. Then we sent people back up on Skylab, we did long-term space occupation, and I developed an instrument that was a capacitive plethysmograph. It was pretty sensitive. It was about the same quality that you would have if you took a coax cable and made a knot in it and asked how tight the knot was based on a capacitive change—that’s a very low level. It measured the change in the volume of your leg, and the skin of your leg at the calf served as one plate of a capacitor. Then we put another plate off of your leg. It was a challenging design to do that, but we did it, and ultimately, we flew those in Skylab. Every third day, a crew member would put one of these on, so every day we did a test. The goal was to find out how the cardiovascular system changed with space flight. That turned out to be a very interesting series of different kinds of experiments.
In life, sometimes you’re doing research, but then you're now in this practical phase, and you're launching a crew. What's going to happen? How do you measure it all? For several years, I could go into the classroom at the Air Force Academy and talk to cadets about practical experience, what was going on. I taught for nine years. I taught the senior design course at the Air Force Academy. I didn't have maze mastering mice like I had done, but this was a different kind of design. This was preparing officers to go out and be contracting officers for developing new systems, new weapons. This was the Air Force Academy and that gave me an exciting chance to bring together the space program with what I had learned in other areas. I'd been involved with several consultancies for the Air Force in special weapons systems, and things like that they were doing. That helped bring together and focus the education side.
After I had twenty years in the Air Force, which was coming up in 1977, I began to think about what I would do next. That led me over into beginning to think about staying in research, which I liked and really enjoyed, or looking at what might be involved in some of the other academic areas. I started to explore around as to what opportunities there were, and I was looking at going into being a department head or going into one of the other university settings, and I had different interviews. The folks up at the South Dakota School of Mines and Technology invited me to come up into be interviewed for a position at the Vice President and Dean of Engineering. Honestly, I had no idea where South Dakota really was. I was living in Colorado Springs at the time, and it wasn’t too far away. But all I could think of was the great plains and a reindeer nuzzling down in the snow to find some grass. I did not want to go to Siberia.
Geselowitz:
You had already been to Montana.
Gowen:
I'd been to Montana already, and I knew where the mountains were, and I'm skeptical, but I went up. I was very pleasantly surprised because the Black Hills of South Dakota are like a miniature part of Colorado; beautiful trees, beautiful environment. The school was a tremendous opportunity to meet good people, and I became fascinated about being involved. They ultimately invited me to be the Vice President and Dean of Engineering. I did that for seven years.
AIEE student membership, IEEE Engineering in Medicine and Biology Society
Geselowitz:
Okay. Before we talk about those seven years, I’d like to ask about IEEE. Prior to that move, in your career through the Airforce Academy, had you come across the AIEE or the IRE yet?
Gowen:
Yes, I became a member of IEEE.
Geselowitz:
At what point?
Gowen:
When I was an undergraduate. As a matter of fact, I was a student member. In 1955, I became a student member of IEEE.
Geselowitz:
It would have been IRE or AIEE at the time.
Gowen:
It was AIEE, not IEEE. Thank you. It was AIEE, and at Rutgers, there were IRE and AIEE, but AIEE was dominant, and within the faculty, this was traditionally where they put their involvement. So, that's how I joined as a student member. Then I entered the student paper contest for AIEE.
Geselowitz:
Oh, so your mouse contest you told me about earlier, that was an AIEE paper contest?
Gowen:
That was an AIEE student paper contest at Brooklyn Poly, and that was really all the engagement. I knew about IRE, but I don’t have a great deal of recollection about it. It wasn't a place we were strongly engaged in. I was also involved in Eta Kappa Nu and Tau Beta Pi. Then I stayed associated with AIEE when I went to the Academy, and that was 1962. We were just beginning to talk about a merger with AIEE and IRE coming together, but when you're engaged as a faculty member, those organizations seem far away. You’re not thinking of that, but some folks in the department at the Air Force Academy were beginning to think about it. There was a lot of activity in this organization. And they started to ask, why don't we form as such, and we started with a Subsection. We opened the Colorado Springs Subsection, I went along with a group, and I think I was the secretary or something in the process. Ultimately, I worked my way up to be Chairman of the Section. It was an involvement for reaching out professionally and forming a community.
When I had worked with my Ph.D. program and finished my degree, I started to make presentations. I had started to go off to conferences and I think the first conference I made was in San Antonio. I went down and gave a paper on my blood pressure developments and all those activities, and it gave me my first chance to become professionally involved. I wasn't really engaged yet in IEEE, but I was in the biomedical area, and it was when we began to put the Subsection together that I started to really understand IEEE. I began to switch to what we would now call the Technical Activities, or TAB side of the involvement—the professional technical societies—from the Regional Activity Board, or RAB, involvement with the Section. At first, I didn't have an understanding of all of that, so that came later.
As we began to move ahead and start developing the programs at the Academy with the lab and with the teaching activities, that led to building a community of the biomedical science and engineering people who were there. The Air Force Academy was on the front range of the mountains. If you think in terms of geography, the next nearest group was at Fort Collins. Boulder had some activity starting, Fort Collins had some activity going, and then ultimately you went up the line, and you went up to Wyoming. There were three universities in addition to the Air Force Academy that were interested in being involved in biomedical engineering. That led us to form an organization. At the Academy, a gentleman who had been involved in the biology department and I came together and started the Rocky Mountain Bioengineering Symposium, RMBS. It was intended to be a local group, but we also wanted to publish. We wanted to be able to bring students together and have a range the activities, so we decided to get a regional meeting together. We went through the Section organization and then went to the Region, in this case IEEE Region 5, which was the local region. We asked them, how could we get their support and endorsement so that it would be an official IEEE function. It was not a good involvement. As a matter of fact, they sort of told us, well, we don't do regional things like that because we have Societies that are national, and we don't have technical regional things. We listened to that and went back and started to grumble. Then we discovered that the Instrument Society of America [ISA] wasn't quite as rigid as IEEE was in those days, so we went over to ISA. They sponsored and published—as a matter of fact, they continue to publish—the Rocky Mountain Bioengineering Symposium, some almost fifty-five years later.
I kept becoming more involved in IEEE, and that led to engaging in EMBS, the IEEE Engineering in Medicine and Biology Society. That came together through conferences because we were putting conferences together. The whole biomedical area was just beginning to bubble. We had physicians that were ready to come and be part of us, but they wanted to be in charge. Those of us that were engineers thought we wanted to be in charge. Well, you see, in our science area—really in all the sciences—behind us are human beings and human beings have to work together, and that helped shape some of the things we were doing. It brought me over to become engaged with the IEEE Engineering in Medicine and Biology Society, EMBS, and little by little I became more involved. I was on the AdCom and then I was asked if I would run to be the president of EMBS, which I did, and I enjoyed that immensely.
Geselowitz:
This is when you're already at the School of Mines?
Gowen:
No, no, this is all still at the Air Force Academy.
Geselowitz:
Still at the Academy.
Gowen:
You see, this was all related to the technical reporting of what we did with the space program.
Geselowitz:
Right.
Gowen:
There was great interest in it because we were doing cardiovascular research and launching astronauts and being able to pick them up. That was good fun and of great interest to a wide range of people, so I reported on that. It gave me an opportunity to become more acquainted with the professional community, and they with me. It was kind of an interesting piece, just to tell you a particular interesting side. I learned through that process that what you want to do is pick out something that other people aren't doing, even if it is difficult --maybe that's why they're not doing it-- and go do it. I also learned to be comfortable with uniqueness. The first time I went to professional meetings, I wore my Air Force uniform. I was enjoying the Air Force and I didn’t have any questions, but I saw people still looking at me like, who's that guy? What's he doing here? It took a while for people to recognize that I had the uniform on, but it was really what I was doing and proud of it.
One time I came in without my uniform on, and I got asked the question of what did I do? Do they not want you anymore? I got to be known in the IEEE side from what I was doing in the space program and the fact that I was engaged in the Air Force. I discovered that at times, being able to sort of stand out a bit from the rest of your people is okay as long as you do it with comfort. That was a great involvement because I had many, many friends and I got to know someone you're related to in the process, your dad!
Geselowitz:
He was definitely involved in that early biomedical engineering work as you were. I think Eric Herz was also involved.
Gowen:
Oh, yes, Eric Herz was involved in San Diego, and I went out to visit him. The first time I met Eric, I was presenting at the San Diego Biomedical Symposium. Those were times in which there are a number of us that were just starting, and we were getting our ideas together. We were trying to figure out, how do we communicate? How do we build this community of people? We did such things as have certification exams. I was engaged with writing a certification exam for clinical engineering. It was an interesting time because on the medical side, there were some physicians that wanted to do this, so we're saying, wait a minute, this is something that crosses the lines.
The people at the National Institute of Health [NIH], contacted me because there was an interesting development. Remember, we're in the early days. We're just beginning to get money flowing. We're just beginning to get paper activity and things going. And NIH was looking at how did you classify this area of biomedical engineering. If you were going to start doing grants, if you were going to have reporting on it, what was the framework that a government agency, such as NIH, should have? I was involved in EMBS at the time, and what came through with that is that we ultimately developed a summary sheet for keywords because if you're going to have a granting process, you have to have keywords and they have to come from somewhere.
At EMBS, I was the Chair of the Editorial Board. We put together a program in which we had a group of, I don't know, ten or fifteen scientists who would read papers and then take a sheet [of paper] and put down what the keywords were. Ultimately, we converged into a set of keywords that were the keywords of the biomedical community and for NIH, so there was a lot of early development that got into how you build a new technical area. There were all these roots that ultimately formed the tree that we now look at.
At the time, we were just doing things, and I didn't even realize it was something unusual and that no one else had done it. We're just doing it, but when you now look in retrospect, you realize that those were the underpinnings of all the things that ultimately, we do now.
That's how I became involved with EMBS. The EMBS involvement basically ended up bringing me to the IEEE Board because in EMBS we were new. IEEE had just come into existence. It was an organization that was only about ten years old. It had to be 1973 and IEEE was just beginning to find itself, to figure out what are its fields of interest, and where they are coming from. Engineering in medicine and biology wasn't quite computers. It wasn't quite vacuum tubes or transistors. It was a little bit different, so how did it fit in? We kind of felt ourselves being accepted, but.
The “but” is that at times we just didn't fit in well, so, those of us that were engaged and working at EMBS came together. We said, we'll do something about this, so let's put a candidate up for IEEE Division Director for the Technical Division that included EMBS. That's how I got to be Division Director. I came on to the IEEE Board of Directors in 1976. I was still at the Air Force Academy. That was my first time as a member of the IEEE Board of Directors, and I had my first Board meeting.
Geselowitz:
Now, given the unusual nature of engineering in medicine and biology, who did they group you with in your Division? What were the other technical sides?
Gowen:
Oh, my, I don't know that I can remember! Well, I'll tell you what my impression was. They lumped together all the different kinds of groups that didn’t fit in elsewhere.
Geselowitz:
That's what I was guessing. Perhaps Societies like the IEEE Society on Social Implications of Technology [SSIT] and the IEEE Systems, Man and Cybernetics Society [SMC].
IEEE-USA, IEEE Presidency
Gowen:
It was that group. We were not the mainstream people. The other Societies were established, and here comes something new over here, and we're not sure about you people. That's how it was treated. I came into the Board representing something different, and there were a number of people that I only have the greatest respect for who were on the Board at that point in time. I had Joe Dillard from Westinghouse and Bob Saunders from education. We had a number of people who were really the early leaders in IEEE, and I had the opportunity to kind of watch them. I didn't yet look at myself as being a leader. I was just elected here, and I didn't have any projections of where I was going because I was just getting started.
I was coming to that point in time in which I had worked on the space program and all of that, and now I was thinking about retiring from the Air Force. I was now starting at IEEE, and it was an interesting time because there's the public meeting, and then there are the private meetings where the Board and the Executive Committee meet, and everybody's working behind the scenes.
At that time, they were all kind of antsy about the general manager and feeling like they needed to make a change in the general manager. Here I am, just walking into IEEE for the first time, and saying, wow, what's going on here? That's how I was introduced to IEEE, and ultimately, I continued to be involved in IEEE.
One of the elements that was occurring in IEEE at that time was called “the good governance movement.” Now, the good governance movement sounds like it was political, well, it was. What was occurring is that as IEEE was forming in 1963, there was a recognition that in addition to the technical issues, there were professional issues, issues that were important to the electrical engineers, the computer scientists, and the people who were engaged in IEEE. The professional issues were about what was happening to us in our workplace, how the country was handling the needs of engineers, and what could we say about that. There was an inherent interest in being able to talk about the role of those of us in the profession, not just in our workplace directly, but the bigger profession. That led to a new title, Vice President for Professional Activities, and the responsibility leading the United States Activities Board [USAB].
A gentleman came in from California who was very, very dynamic, and he was engaged within the political scene in California. He understood how you had to work the political side. That didn't always fit well with some of the rest of the members of the IEEE Board of Directors because over here was sort of a political arena, and over there they are talking about the professional and technical arenas. So, there started to be a little bit of a clash. The good governance question was could we go out to industry, and could we find people who really understood what it meant to be an IEEE member in addition to these other political things in the profession? That was an interesting period because many volunteers thought that we had to bring onto the Board of Directors people who would be the president of IEEE and who had the deep background of traditional IEEE activities, as opposed to those involved in the changes that were occurring.
I found myself sort of caught up in that change process. They had a Vice President for Professional Activities, who I succeeded. Bruno Weinschel was a good engineer, a wonderful person, and a very strong person. Bruno was a good leader, but he also was very comfortable with Congressional involvements and knew that IEEE should be engaged. Bruno sort of brought the aura of respectability to being able to do these political things. Then I became the Vice President for Professional Activities. I served there for two years and basically restructured the United States Activities Board’s professional program. Today, it’s pretty much the way we put it together because we spent a lot of time talking about what should you do, who should be engaged, what are the committees you should have, and how should it function. We put together Professional Activities on the local level and then we had our first national meetings over Labor Day in Phoenix. We went out to Phoenix and brought together all these engineers. We started with just fifty, then it got to be one hundred, and pretty soon it got to be a couple hundred, all focused on how should we handle the professional side of IEEE’s involvement.
At that point of time, I was engaged in looking at what was happening to our engineers in the workplace. The space program was changing, we went through a recession, we found that there were a number of engineers without jobs, and there were issues with how technical contracts were done at that time. I had a lot of trips to Florida to visit with NASA because I understood NASA. I'd worked with them, so I could relate back and forth. It turned out to be the right thing to be doing at that time.
It even influenced my being elected to President of IEEE. By the way, I didn't understand that IEEE would be going into its centennial. It’s just that IEEE elected its presidents by the Board of Directors determining who they wanted to elect, and then they put up one candidate, and that candidate was then voted on by the membership. In those days, we had a person who lived in Long Island who was basically the perennial opposition candidate, and that was Irwin Feerst. There would be two candidates, one on the ballot by IEEE selection, and the other was on the ballot by a sort of local nomination by collecting signatures on a petition. I had finished being engaged as the Vice President for Professional Activities—it would've been 1981—and I was sort of floating. I didn't know what was going to happen. I still wanted to be involved in IEEE, and in the back of my mind, I thought, there's an opportunity that one day you may get elected to be the President of the Board.
There was a meeting in Washington, and Nancy and I came in. We were there for another activity, but we went over to IEEE because there was a luncheon meeting, and John Schroeder, who was the director of NSF, was presenting. I knew John, and we wanted to go over and hear his presentation. We were waiting outside because the Board was in Executive Session, and we were waiting for the lunch to come. One of the members of the Board came out and said to me, you don't want to be here. I said, what are you talking about, why don’t I want to be here? I want to hear John's presentation. The answer was, we're debating in here what we're going to do for the presidential election, your name is being tossed around, and it's probably better if you're not here. I'm thinking, what is this all about? I said, so what exactly do you mean? And he said, we are talking about having an election with two Board-designated candidates.
What I subsequently learned was going on was the question of what you do going into the centennial. Do you go back to the good governance side in which we want to be able to have a person who people would recognize from industry, or do we have a person who is sort of academic who is more involved in the technical areas. They said, this guy Gowen has been involved in the Board and he's done a lot of things, but on the other hand we're going to do the centennial, so is this really the person we want?
There were those on the Board who thought that I should be the president, and there were those on the Board who thought that in this case, there should be another, higher profile president coming in, so they were thinking about having two candidates and letting the members decide. I must tell you that my first reaction to that was that this is crazy. Why are we going to go through this? With two candidates, there's going to be a winner, and there's going to be a loser. I could be the loser! I didn't like that, but I agreed to run.
It wasn't like it is now, with the formal candidates’ debates and so forth, because we were just beginning to think about how to make a presidential election work. A lot of folks knew me—more than I had anticipated—from my IEEE Professional Activities and USAB involvements, from working on technical contracts, and from working on what was happening at NASA. I began to get comments from people, like “we're glad you're running,” and that led me to think about, well, how do you let people know what you're doing? How do you campaign for president of IEEE? I put together a flyer, I remember, and sent it out. But there was an interesting press involvement in IEEE those days, because of Irwin Feerst's activities and his claim that the IEEE Board wasn't taking care of engineers’ interests professionally. There was an industry newspaper called EE Times that was published, and the reporter for EE Times would call up and want the IEEE official opinion about this, this, and this, so as VP [Vice President], I would get the call. It got to the point that I would say, now I'm going to record this call to make sure that what I said was being properly reported because we had that kind of funny situation happening within the profession.
Here's IEEE moving up well on the technical side, and then at the same time, there are others who are saying, but you have to be engaged in these other types of activities and help our industries and all of this. Some of the money you could be putting into working with Washington and dealing with engineer immigration issues and so forth. What are you doing? I ended up getting more involved with that. At the time, it was one of those things that I had to do, but when I look back on it in perspective, it really gave me an interesting exposure.
I was somewhat surprised when I ended up getting elected IEEE President, but pleased, of course. Then we started the preparation for the centennial. Actually, I joined the Board the year before my presidency, I guess as the first President- Elect because you wanted somebody in there to already start planning the centennial.
Then that started the History Center activities. As we came together to celebrate the centennial, we knew we had to look back as well as forward. It was a “Century of Giants,” so we had to talk about who the giants were. It gave me an incredible opportunity to go out and look in retrospect upon what the IEEE is, how far it had come from AIEE and IRE days, and how those predecessor organizations had merged. They brought all this legacy of development, and we began to think about how we could communicate technical ideas, technical development, and technical excellence. This was an interesting challenge because it was a shift from what IEEE was doing. We had been providing venues for people to come in and talk about their technical excellence in their societies or field areas. Now we were going to shift from an organizational point of view and start talking about the larger IEEE, so it involved a lot of internal shifting of what could we do.
Geselowitz:
Before you say more about that, could you just go back a second and say a little bit about globalization, because I think this is background to what you're about to talk about. The increasing globalization of IEEE led to tensions in the professional activity piece, because the professional activity piece was involved around USAB, United States Activities Board, but we had increasing numbers of people from outside of Regions 1 through 6 wanting to join the organization because of the success on the technical side.
Gowen:
Absolutely.
Geselowitz:
Say a little bit about that.
Gowen:
It took on some very interesting areas of development because we had an international affairs committee that had representatives from outside the United States and some representatives from the IEEE Board. The technical side and the region side were also on that committee. It was an attempt on trying to bring together and bridge the changing IEEE. I think back to Germany as an example with its own national organization VDE. At that time, we were beginning to participate in international conferences more, and from the technical side the issue became one of well, what did it mean to have a technical conference outside the United States and what did it mean for the local engineers?
Eric Herz was very much involved in bringing together an agreement that brought us as an IEEE Board to Germany. We met and attended a conference, we had Executive Committee meetings, and then ultimately, we came together and signed an agreement with VDE.
What IEEE began then to realize was that we could provide technical information that would support the professional societies that were typically local. We discovered around the world that there were groups that came together more as professional societies than as technical societies. They handled the interests of local government, conditions of employment, and so forth. For instance, we discovered that in Norway the professional group actually negotiated with the government on the salaries that the government employees would be paid. They took on various perspectives, different than what we do here in the United States. As an international committee and as a Board, we began to recognize we had value to give to them from the technical side. It began our ability to reach out and to provide technical support that could then be published. And it began to develop that first business relationship of IEEE providing services to others that little by little worked across the globe.
When I was involved with Professional Activities, I went to Yugoslavia. In Yugoslavia, I represented IEEE's professional development, and I was asked to come and speak to the Section in Yugoslavia and talk about what we were doing. Of course, behind all of that was the question that this is behind the wall; this is a communist country. How do you handle their professional side from the United States? Interesting discussion. I wasn't fully prepared when I walked in because I didn't quite know what that venue was. When you walk in and suddenly discover that you're in a situation in which the government is with you on everything you're doing, but you've got people who don't necessarily want the government involved, you begin to get this schism. You take long walks out into the countryside and talk about what you could talk about. Does it mean that it's uncomfortable talking about these things? Yes, in this environment, so let's just go out there and talk.
We began to be recognized around the world, and our activities were very broad. We had activities like those we had been used to in IEEE in the United States, but when you go to other borders, you begin to appreciate that people are different.
Now, in the development within IEEE, it became a question of how do you represent the people outside the United States? Yes, we had ten Regions, but to simply say that you have a Region Director is not adequate to represent all the members of a Region. What is the depth of involvement? What are the various countries? How do you work with the Sections? These were all questions we had to ask and that led to the first IEEE Sections Congress. The first Sections Congress occurred during the centennial year in which we brought people in from all over the world to start talking about what IEEE was. It's not just six Regions in the United States. It is ten Regions around the globe, and it ties together all the interests. It opened the door for us to begin to see what we could do.
When I was the centennial president, there were—I don't know that I exactly remember the number—like thirty-eight or forty different countries represented. It was a very, very busy year. People tend to like you when you give them awards and give them medals and do things, and that’s what we did, so it was a very positive involvement. It was the start of many of the things that we now see. For example, in 1983, when I was the President-Elect, I led a delegation of sixteen engineers to China. That was in a sense a follow-on because we had first begun to open the doors up to China even before AIEE and IRE merged. They each had tried to have activities in China. They merged, and we started to go over with delegations of engineers. This ended up in 1983 in a three-week trip to China. We visited not only many temples, but beyond that, we visited many factories. We began to talk to academic people as well. It gave me the chance to appreciate, as much as I could, depth over a period of time. Three weeks is not long, but it was longer than most of our international trips. It brought home to me that we shouldn't be doing these delegations. It was time to have a regular relationship.
In China, in those days, everything was through various government agencies. We still do that to some extent, but at that time we were directly sponsored by the Ministry of Electrical Machinery and that was fine. We had one trip in which we went out and we went to this place that looked like it was a university setting. I said, what is this? Oh, it's just the factory. I said, I'd like to see it, and I think while we're here, we should have a chance to see this factory. It wasn't on the agenda, and it created a problem with the local people. Who's this strange man asking to see our factory? We went and we looked at the factory. It turned out the Japanese had just given new technology to China and brought into China a full capability to go from sand to turning out CRTs to basically make a complete monitor unit. After we looked at that, we came back, and I said, folks, suppose we talk about making this the last delegation to China. Suppose we talk about signing an agreement where there'll be a Section in China.
That was a little bit bold, but as it turned out, a year later, Eric Herz and I went back and signed the agreement to start what at the time was the Beijing Section. That began movement because it's still all part of that international growth. We were seeing China growing, and we were impressed when we walked around China and saw our IEEE publications all over. However, we knew that they weren't bought, they basically were pirated. There were all those kinds of things that were driving us. We said, it is time to become serious and work together, which we did, and that's been a good relationship.
Yes, the international focus came into major eminence with the centennial. It gave us the time to point out how the world has been shaped by innovators throughout the world, not just the scientists and leaders in America, as when we talk about [Thomas] Edison and [Alexander Graham] Bell. You go around and look at the technology leaders around the world. You've got such a broad base. You had the industries developed around the world. You go to Japan and see what Japan was doing. You go to Brazil and see how Brazil was emerging. Pretty soon you realize that it was time for IEEE to truly be a global organization. It has moved very well in that process. Those were exciting opportunities to see.
Geselowitz:
Are there any other high points you want to focus on for your presidential year, the centennial year, that you think are of interest.
Gowen:
For the centennial, we had lots of people involved, and John Ryder, who had been with GE and an academic, became involved. John was the sort of person who just understood the wriggle aspect you needed to get things done in IEEE. There were some days in which I just shook my head at John and said, my God, how are we going to do all those things, but we did, and it all came out great.
It also helped me in that process to think about how you describe IEEE. We were preparing a brochure to be given out during the centennial. I think I had three different sessions in New York with the artist and the people putting it together. And it clicked for me and I said what I'd like you to do is put something together that people will know by looking at it what IEEE is—a brochure that went from the space program to telephones to power. Put all those pieces together so that if I laid it in front of you, you would see it, and your mind would immediately connect what IEEE is about. It would take our fields of interest and enable you to see it directly in your mind.
That turned out to be a very, very popular approach because you could lay it out, and look at it, and you could take it away—people could immediately pick up what was IEEE. So that sort of started our visibility efforts, our efforts of going out and communicating what IEEE is. We begin to recognize that we had to tell a story. We talked about putting exhibits in airports. We talked about putting exhibits around in other places. We had a number of ways of reaching out. Today, we still talk about public visibility of IEEE and brand recognition. Well, we started it back at the centennial because it was an opportunity to bring it all together.
I enjoyed the centennial. It was a very, very busy time in the centennial, being IEEE President. It turned out to be even much busier for me than I thought because in 1984, the centennial year, I got tapped by the governor of South Dakota to change the mission of what had been the first teacher's college of the Dakota Territories.
This came about in an interesting way. Citibank was engaged in selling credit cards, and the way the economics of the world were going at that point, credit cards got to be pretty expensive. So much so that Citibank was having difficulty being able to sell credit cards out of New York City. The governor of South Dakota caught on to that. Our legislative session was in progress—we only have a two-month session in the legislature—and the governor got the legislature to change our laws overnight, so that Citibank could locate its credit card center in Sioux Falls, South Dakota, which they did. That brought in some 3,000 people basically overnight.
In that process, the head of Citibank, Dick Macross [spelling?], and Governor William John Janklow [know as Bill Janklow] talked about trying to take this Dakota Teacher's College and now put it into a corporate development center. It was a good idea, and I was asked to make some comments on that, and I helped with the consultancy, then I forgot about it. One day I got a call from the governor's office that he wants to talk to me, and I'm trying to think about what I have done that the governor wants to talk to me about. And what it ended up is that it had been suggested that I would be the person that ought to go over to Dakota State University.
Dakota State University
Geselowitz:
The Teacher's College was renamed Dakota State University as part of this process?
Gowen:
Yes. It had already been renamed from Dakota School to Dakota State College, and ultimately, we got the name changed to Dakota State University. The challenge was how do you bring it together to effect a change and create a computer-oriented university that would now be talking about the management of information, and that gave the opportunity for people to go down to Citibank and get some very good jobs. The university still exists. It's got Ph.D. programs. It is strong in the security area. It has contracts with our National Security Agency and Homeland Security Agency.
It started and took off very well. That was in 1984, and I was on my way to South Africa for a centennial celebration, and South Africa turned out to be Madison, South Dakota. Then for the remainder of the year, in addition to being [IEEE] Centennial President, I was now building a university. It was one of those situations where you discover you have many constituencies to serve. You're going to take care of your faculty. You have to try to do what you're doing with the governor, with the legislature, and with all the political leadership.
It was an interesting time, and for three years I was the President at Dakota State. Then the Board of Regents one day told me, well, we've got another assignment for you. I would have stayed there. The program was going very well. But I ended getting sent back to the South Dakota School of Mines and Technology as the President. For six months, I traveled across to South Dakota, six hours if you drive, but if you fly, you can do it in an hour and 45 minutes. I was flying back and forth across the state because I was president of both Dakota State and South Dakota School of Mines and Technology for six months.
Geselowitz:
Until they could replace you at Dakota State?
Gowen:
Yes, until they could replace me at Dakota State, and that was an interesting time. Life has been a series of opportunities, and it was reinforced to me that sometimes you may have to take some gambles. You may win, you may not, but at least, you do it, and see where it goes. That's how that came together, and ultimately, at the School of Mines and at Dakota State, there were tremendous growth opportunities to bring things together and build teaching programs and research programs.
At the School of Mines, we tripled within time the funding that they had there. I ended up working with the Army and serving some of the needs of the Army, and we built those programs up again. We basically built research activities, did some interesting programs academically, and it was a good time. In 2003, I retired from the School of Mines as president.
Geselowitz:
I wanted to ask you now, before we go ahead to after you retired as president of the School of Mines, two questions. First, during that period when you've stepped down as IEEE Centennial President, but have this major academic appointment, how did you stay involved in IEEE activities? Second, could you and did you stay involved in industrial activity and/or research?
IEEE Foundation
Gowen:
IEEE was sort of a natural followup because when you step down as President, you’re Past President. I had already done some work with the IEEE Foundation. IEEE had just basically started the elements of the Foundation. There was money that had been contributed, donated to IEEE, so we set up a Foundation and the President of IEEE became the President of the IEEE Foundation.
I was the president of the Foundation in those days, and we talked about what we could do with some of this money, and how we could invest it to help the profession. We had those kinds of developments, and I stayed involved in that. Then when I stepped down from being an IEEE Board member, I became involved in the American Association of Engineering Societies [AAES’ because as IEEE President, I had been very much engaged within the AAES Board as an IEEE representative in working our interest. When I stopped being the IEEE representative, AAES asked if I would consider running as their chairman, so for two years, I was the chairman of AAES. Those were informative years, and we had issues during those days about what societies were going to be involved. The National Society of Professional Engineers [NSPE] was engaged in certain professional activities, and AAES was sort of stepping on their areas of interest, so how could IEEE, AAES, and NSPE come together? We did a lot of negotiating around the issues of how do you represent engineers, how do you represent the engineering profession, how did you cut across all the areas of engineering, not just electrical, [and] how do we bring it together?
Those were formative days in trying to put those issues into perspective [and it] led to some interesting issues for me moving from the point of IEEE to beyond IEEE into the five Founder Societies [United Engineering Foundation Founder Societies]. How could the five Founder Societies work together on in effect making the changes, because at that time we were getting ready to talk about leaving the United Engineering Center.
We were beginning to talk about how could we get better money return on our investment? For IEEE, we began to move to Piscataway, [New Jersey], and we started our Distribution Center here. Then we began to move other operations out here over a period. I was engaged with some of those activities, not so much in the direct line, but in support lines.
I served on several committees. For example, I was part of the Tellers Committee. If there was a problem with the election, we could bring together some distinguished members of IEEE to resolve the issues. I found myself, while I was engaged with what I was doing academically, still engaged in the profession. AAES went through an interesting period while I was still on the IEEE Board. The Soviets had invaded Afghanistan in 1979, and in1985, the year following the centennial, fighting escalated. We had folks who were very, very unhappy with the fact that Russia had become engaged with Afghanistan. They saw that as something that was inappropriate. They said, here is a professional organization that's basically going to take a political stand, and they did. Basically, as an IEEE Board, we said that we would not host exchange trips with Russian engineers and scientists, AAES followed it up, and so did the other engineering professional societies.
Although brought out by the war, there were deeper grievances. Our position was, when you come to the United States, you want to go to Bell Labs. You want to see all our technical sites., but when we go to Russia, you take us to the Bolshoi, and you take us to the opera. That's not the kind of exchange that we need, so in that process, a resolution was made that we would send an engineer to Russia to find out what Russia would do to share more evenly in exchanges. I was designated to be that engineer, but just then I got sent back to the School of Mines and had to handle the issue with the School of Mines. For a couple years, I'm trying to get ready to go to Russia, but getting the time to do that became difficult.
Finally, however, I did go to Russia. It was two weeks before Glasnost when I went, and it was a time to kind of understand from an engineering perspective what was happening within Russia. I had one presentation that I made, and the Russians arranged to take me to Moscow and then Novosibirsk, so we went out to that area. Novosibirsk was where they had been doing their fighter developments, their bomber developments. They took me to that town. I had never seen that before. The fact that they would take somebody out there and take me down to the Soviet Academy of Sciences and to engage me in that way was quite a change. It was a demonstration of their interest. It was also an opportunity to begin to understand where the Soviet engineers were thinking, particularly the electrical engineers.
I had one meeting which I went into, and I don't think the Soviets had caught on to the fact that, in my professional career, I had studied Russian. I can't do much in Russian now, but at that time I could read pretty well. We had a meeting in which there was a full room. There must've been fifty people in the room. The chairman from the Russian side had between us a set of questions, and I could look down the questions. We went around the room, and each person had their questions, and I could look down and know the next question. I didn't say anything. I just could read it. Then we stopped the prepared questions, and then the real questions started, like how do you figure out what something costs? How do you sell products? How do you put money in the bank? What do you get? We got down to that level. We could've gone on for hours, but we were now in areas that were a little bit uncomfortable for the way things were. That was the opening. I got the chance to make that first trip, and then ultimately, I've made several trips back to Russia since.
My engagement with the professional societies continued. I pretty much went into a period of little direct activity on a day-to-day basis with IEEE, but I kept engaged. I would go to conferences and meetings, but I wasn't engaged at the leadership level until it became time that I was going to retire. Then I was asked if I would come on the IEEE Foundation Board again. The Foundation was evolving, so would I take what experience I had had and help build the IEEE Foundation in the process? That's how I became reactivated within IEEE. Ultimately, I was elected President of the Foundation, and that's where I've had the chance to serve since then.
Along the way, one day I got tapped and asked if I would work with you and the History Center. For three years, in addition to being the Foundation President, I was engaged as Chairman of the IEEE History Committee. I worked with you on history activities, the IEEE Global History Network [later, Engineering and Technology History Wiki, ETHW] and lots of things that were very exciting. Those were good days, and I think that's still continuing.
Geselowitz:
Right. Your idea and your influence in building the Global History Network has really transformed the way the IEEE History Center does business. Eric Herz was a big champion from the beginning of the History Center, but there has always been a question of exactly where it fits in with other IEEE activities. When Eric was no longer General Manager, and we started putting other functions under the General Manager, people couldn't quite fit us in. The Foundation seemed like a logical fit, so that's how you got started in your involvement with us.
Gowen:
Yes, that's how I got involved. There was controversy in bringing it together because the question was how much do we fund it, and how do we bring the funding together? What do we do? You're right, those were the issues, and it was not something that had been paramount in my thinking process because I was concentrating on the Foundation. Then suddenly the Board of Directors makes decisions.
Geselowitz:
In their infinite wisdom.
Humanitarian efforts, reflections
Gowen:
In their infinite wisdom. I found out that I was now Chairman of the History Committee as well. What do you do? You say okay there is a problem here, but we'll figure out how to work it. That has been pretty much my IEEE involvement.
Similarly, I recently become engaged with the question of how do we work the whole humanitarian effort? When I had been to China way back, and as I traveled around, I become more engaged with what other people are doing. It is the idea of what happens within their societies that’s different than our society.
Mike, I think of standing on a street corner in China and having an interpreter look over to me and say, I know what that pin you are wearing is, and I think she's going to tell me it's a pin. She says, that is the right-hand rule. My jaw dropped. Here is a person who is an interpreter who can tell me, that is the right-hand rule. I kept thinking to myself, I could go back to my university and if I asked a person what this on my pin is, they'd look at me and say you're strange. You know, what do you mean?
This started opening me up to realizing that the world is different than we are. Traveling to Japan and other places, you recognize there are lots of different issues around the world. You go to India, and you are beginning to see that there are some very interesting challenges. Then you begin to go back and look at the countries that before you only saw the face of the government. You did not see the people who were out here and how it all worked behind the scenes. That started my interest in humanitarian efforts.
What soon became clear was that you could start doing some things, but it was going to be very difficult to get them done. For example, I was in India, and it was suggested that I try to figure out if IBM would continue a program it was doing on using cell phones as ways that you could communicate for NGO activities. I went and followed that up and ended up discovering that IBM had a very interesting program in which it was working with its staff to do something very exciting. The staff in India had proposed to be able to go out and help the villages to be able to get better economic growth, to get better education.
At the same time, while I was there, I found that one of our IEEE members was very much engaged with a computer scientist who was engaged in working with children with autism. Here we are out doing things, so how could we, IEEE, help them? How could we support them? What did they need to be able to be better able to handle? That opened some of the first humanitarian activities, and Lewis Terman was involved with me. He was IEEE President at that time, and I was IEEE Foundation President. I got very excited helping Lew and Bobbie Terman.
We are just now beginning to see what is possible. I have been very supportive, and I am very supportive of the humanitarian activities. That led to the Engineering for Change—E4C—discussion with ASME [American Society of Mechanical Engineers]. Watching where we move on that front is another outreach side. It is not quite like going back to the professional area and good governance. It is a different approach, although it does have parallels. It is turning out that it is a phenomenally interesting approach for IEEE. At the Foundation, in a typical cycle if we had thirty grant proposals that would come in, it would be a heavy cycle, but now the last cycle and this cycle, we're running over fifty proposals, and many of them are from the humanitarian side, and they're international proposals. They are people who are thinking of things they want to do in this area.
It is part of the changing nature of what is IEEE and rethinking how we reach out. In addition to that, we need to look at changes at the Board level [and] the governance level. There is a recognition that there are some issues that, yes, we see in America, but that also cut far across the transnational agendas. For example, issues of workforce development become very, very critical. Recently, I ended up getting asked by West Point if I would deliver a keynote address at an energy summit conference, which I took on to do. I worked on that back in February and delivered the address in March. It forced me to think about energy and population, and what are some of the global issues. In that time, I began to appreciate a little bit more of what has been happening in the world. For example, these developments that the press calls “the Arab Spring” are a part of that. I'm looking at energy, and it's helped me tie together, in a way, what the population in the world is doing.
When you think about the major issues facing the world, you see that Richard Smalley—the gentleman who basically developed all of our nano systems and won the Nobel Prize—had put out a list of the most important issues, and energy was the first issue on his list. You look at energy, and then you look at water, and you look at other humanitarian issues, and you look at the uneven distribution of wealth. All that sort of opens the door up to then begin to get you to appreciate how this world is changing.
From an IEEE perspective now, we look ahead. We have been so used to having an adequate number of employees in the economy. Our industries have the people they need. We're beginning now to recognize that that this has become an issue. The populations are changing. We're healthier. We live longer, and our birth rate's down. We are not getting as many people in that workforce, period. The question is what can we, IEEE, do to help in that area. Those are the sorts of issues now that are beginning to emerge as we address the question of where we are going as IEEE. You go back to AIEE, IRE, and we came together to support technical development. Then we reached out to the broader profession. Now, as we go beyond that, the question arises of what are the main technical issues as computers and all that transform society. As I come back and look at where we are coming from, starting to look at these larger global issues makes sense.
As we become more and more global—50 percent of our members are outside the United States now—and you start looking at what are the global issues, the question becomes how do we in leadership mode begin to help IEEE get ready to help others answer those questions? If I go back to the first day that I joined the student section until now and look at the range of activities, it's been an interesting trip.
Now, you also asked the question about industry. When I was at the Air Force Academy, in addition to what I was doing with space, I was very involved in looking at various things that the military needed. You don't always think about having your services—the Army, Navy, Air Force, Marines—working together, but sometimes they do have to work together. If they can't communicate, they can't work together, so issues about how did you do communication came into process.
During that period, we had Vietnam and had lots and lots of difficulties here, and we were pushing technology as a solution. I had the chance to do that, and I spent many hours in the Pentagon because people there knew me.
Then when we had Three Mile Island, the gentleman who was the chair of the Nuclear Regulatory Communication [NRC] was a friend, called up one day and said, Dick, can the IEEE do the things you do in communications and power and reliability—all of these things you are bringing together with computers—and help us get that over into the nuclear industry? That led to a two-year project with a joint Chairmanship with a gentleman who had been the director of the regulatory side, NRC. We brought in some 400 consultants and, in that process, developed the probabilistic risk assessment process, which is now in use for licensing in nuclear reactors. What could go wrong? Build up your probabilities; get the ability to basically quantify that. That was one of several different forays into industry areas.
I also had the chance to be on a Congressional Commission, which was appointed to look at STEM education, and how you could develop STEM education. For two years, I worked that.
When I was in Madison, [South Dakota] I got a call one day and asked if I would consider being an outside director on the board of a new supercomputer company, ETA [ETA Systems Inc.]. CDC [Control Data Corporation] was a corporation that had been developing supercomputers and felt that, maybe instead of trying to do all of it, with changes in the computing area impacting the bottom line, spin it off. Basically, for six years, I was engaged in developing supercomputers. Our goal was to make a ten-gigaflop computer. We put CMOS into liquid nitrogen and cooled it. This table we're sitting at is roughly 30 inches in diameter. We had a Dewar flask about 30 inches in diameter filled with liquid nitrogen and we put two circuit boards in it to get the supercomputer running. That ended up being a tremendous technical development. Very good. I also had the ability to be engaged with the business side and some of the corporate side. I would end up going to Minneapolis, where the meetings of the Board were, going over across town and going to the leadership of CDC and saying, we need another $10 million, so can you provide that? It was a very interesting process because the other people were all engaged with CDC, and they had a certain amount of pressure on them. They asked me to come in because they knew I wasn't going to worry about the pressure.
Ultimately, it ended up that I was the last stock conversion for the company because CDC ended up not being able to continue as it was going and they closed the ETA process. Since I was the only real independent in the group, I always had the capability of suing and that helped get the price up. The negotiations lasted six months.
I began the negotiations while I was at Madison, and then continued coming over to the School of Mines and Technology. My industry involvement remained very strong. Of course, being president of a technological university, I had lots and lots of engagement with industry. In 2000, that sort of led to a call from the National Science Foundation because in South Dakota, we had the deepest gold mine of the Americas. It was 8,000 feet deep, and took out 40 million ounces of gold; that’s lots of dollars. The mine was no longer profitable; 8,000 feet is a deep mine. The physics people, in 1962, had put an experiment down in there to see if neutrinos were real, and ultimately, in 2002, Ray Davis received the Nobel Prize for proving that neutrinos did exist. Since the mine was closing, there was interest in turning it into a lab and NSF was not able to acquire it because NSF cannot acquire property. They asked if we would be interested. I hung up from NSF, called the governor, and then ended up with a process that started in 2000. When I retired in 2003, I went to work for another governor, and spent three years getting the mine over so that it could become a national lab.
The mining company was very direct. We've been in here 126 years. We're leaving. We're not going to continue being involved. You want it, you figure out how you're going to transfer it, and figure out how you take care of all the liabilities in the future. We did that; I did that. Then in 2004, I retired from that, and became involved again with IEEE along the way.
I have another nonprofit involvement. We have this mountain in South Dakota called Mount Rushmore, which has four presidents in stone. It's a shrine to democracy. The group responsible for it had an interest in what was going on in the world, so for them, I helped found an institute that looks at international issues. Specifically, I formed a group that looked at the situation in the Middle East. We had a perspective of saying, what do we, as Americans, not understand about what's going on in the rest of the world, and how can we educate ourselves? I did that for a year, pretty much, and brought that in. It came around to the point where I was involved with the IEEE Foundation, and that was occupying a great deal of time.
Then one day, I got a phone call from a gentleman who I had first met at Iowa State when I was a graduate student. This gentleman, Bill Hughes, was leaving to become the head of the department in Oklahoma, and I got the chance to clean his lab out because I needed to do my research. Over the years, we became friends and interacted, and when I became President of the School of Mines in 1987, Bill was getting ready to retire from his company, and he came up to be Vice President for five years with me. Then he taught in the power program.
While he was with his company in Saudi Arabia, Bill had developed the ability to take six- and eight-foot diameter pipes and heat them for about six inches around so that you could put epoxy on them. When you put them down in the sand, they would not corrode. He understood power. He understood heavy power. His wires were this big, and they had a motor in the middle of them because they'd melt otherwise.
He thought about power, and while he was teaching graduate students at the School of Mines and Technology, he thought about you might adapt a technology that is almost 150 years old that at one time powered locomotives. It’s called switch reluctance. Take a nail, put a coil of wire around it, put a battery on it, and it'll track into the nail; it’s reluctance. Bill asked, could you use that, and could that be a way that in effect you could make a new type of electric drive? Well, he made a prototype, proof of concept, and he got it patented.
He called up and said, Dick, you know a lot of people, so who would want to buy this? How can I sell it? I said, Bill, let me look at it. I looked at it, and I said, Bill, you don't have enough information to sell it, and his response to me was, Dick, I'm dying of leukemia. He was in a hospital bed.
We talked about it, and we said, we'll find somebody who wants to develop this. We tried to find somebody. Bill and I formed a company, but we were unable to find somebody else to develop it, so, when Bill died, the somebody became me. We are now developing a company that's basically funded to develop electric drive systems using the technology that is an old, 150-year-old historic technology, but today we put computers into it for intelligent control. Now we take all the things that you can do with advanced microprocessors and get a very smart motor that can do some very interesting pieces. In a way, I’ve come back to some of the work I began at RCA. Interesting journey.
Other nonprofits and NGOs
Geselowitz:
It's a very interesting journey. I only have one more question, and then I'll ask you if you have anything you want to add. I think you've done a great job of covering your IEEE career, your academic career, your industry career, which we just talked about, but you mentioned in passing this Mount Rushmore Institute. I was just wondering, because you're been so busy being involved with IEEE, if there were any other nonprofit involvements you had. You know, Boy Scouts or something like that that you want mentioned for the interview.
Gowen:
Oh, yes. I've been engaged with nonprofits and NGOs for most of my career. There's been industry engagement and there's been government engagement, but there's also the community-wide engagement. Way back in New Brunswick I started out as a Boy Scout, and ultimately, I worked the summers at the Boy Scout camp while I was in college. In the process of which I had a pet raccoon that I would take with me, and I had two snakes. I had a rattler and a copperhead. I was sort of at the stage of my development where I could say here's a kind of side to me that was fun. It was good. I'd take people out climbing up over the hills and going up and down the Appalachian Trail. I did that for a while. I continued that sort of activity even when I was at the Air Force Academy. At the Academy, I had two brothers that came in. I didn't know it at the time, but we would have an intersection of life again. We created a trail that you could come to as Scouts or anybody else, and you could walk around the trail and get a patch for your trail achievement. The two young men later came to Rapid City, South Dakota, so when I came up there, I got to meet them again. One became head of the local utility. It's because you start with Scouts and things of that type, and it leads to other areas, so it was good. We've enjoyed that.
Nancy and I have been very active with community groups because when you're the president of a university, you have a lot of opportunities to ask people for support, and there's always the reciprocal.
Geselowitz:
They have the opportunity to ask you for support.
Gowen:
They ask you for support, but you don’t do it just for that reason. That's part of where you get the richness of life because you go out and you touch groups. One of those involvements was in the whole educational arena. While I was at the School of Mines and Technology, we developed software to be able to support the use of computers in education. And out of all that, when I was starting to work at the mine to have the mine converted to a lab, Governor Rounds at that point asked if I would serve on the State Board of Education. literally am still a member of the State Board of Education of South Dakota. My engagement there is looking at technology; how do we do it? South Dakota's a small state.
Geselowitz:
Population wise?
Gowen:
Well, it's a tremendous area, you're right. It's 88,000 square miles, but its population density is ten people per square mile. It's 2,000 per square mile here in New Jersey. But when you consider what that does for you, it opens some interesting relationships because you get to know the governors. You get to know all the folks in [the South Dakota] Congress. You've got a relationship. It helps you do things. With Governor Janklow, the state ended up where 75 percent of all the people in elementary, secondary, K to 12 education, and higher education could be on the Internet at the same time. Now, that takes a lot of money, and the way that was done was a little bit inventive. You basically took trustees from prison, and you trained them to be installers and technicians because you didn't have a lot of installers. No one was arguing with you because they didn't necessarily want to come here and do this. They didn't want to come from New Jersey or New York and do it, so you could build it your way. You caught on as to how you can do those things. So, that's been part of my education, and it has colored a lot of my career because I have understood that if people need to do something, then if there's a will, there's a way. You figure out how to make it work.
As I said, Nancy and I are very involved in the community and very involved in what we do because we've enjoyed it a great deal. I came to school here at Rutgers, the state supported me, and I could not have come if I didn't have that support. Well, what do you do to help people now? We look at what we can do, and we have a feeling of what time we put in IEEE. The time we put into organizations is just small payback, recognition, thanks, for the mentoring we received from others. We do a lot of that and it’s a good time. There's a balance that you look at in life because in our family we have five children, one son and four daughters. Three of whom are engineers, one's a teacher, and our son is still associated with supporting military efforts. We have ten grandsons and we have one adopted granddaughter. We have a family that does a lot of things, and all of that. We have a child who is disabled, who has Down Syndrome, and it's caused us to be very, very sensitive to what people are, so a lot of that.
I've gone through all these activities and changes, all of which as you go through and you look back, you appreciate what education means to people and where that comes from. We are very strongly into supporting education, and the IEEE Foundation is a major activity for us, but education is also a major activity. I'm coming to the point here in the Foundation in which I will sort of “term out” as president. My term is coming to an end, and we're going to have an election. It's turned out to be kind of a fluke. The Foundation has always just chosen a president, but this year we're going to have an election of two people up for president. I got to chuckle about that because that's how I started in IEEE.
Geselowitz:
That's how you became IEEE President.
Gowen:
That's what I'm helping to do now. If you look at it, it is just the way human beings are. We interact at various levels, and that is what gives us the strength.
Geselowitz:
What goes around comes around.
Gowen:
What goes around comes around.
Geselowitz:
Do you have anything you'd like to add? I think that was a fantastic interview.
Gowen:
The only thing that I would add is a note about how important IEEE can be to an engineer’s career. When I look back at IEEE, what IEEE gave me was the opportunity to have a parallel career track so that I could be very much engaged in management and leadership levels that are unparalleled. If you think of an organization of our size, and the ability to have volunteers and staff working as we do as an organization, that gives a chance for development that is unique. I don't know of any other parallel. Later, I could be engaged at top levels and handling crises in the university, and I have handled many crises. Then I would look over and think of what I had as experience from IEEE crises. The difference is that at IEEE in many ways, you could go home and know that there's a staff to take care of it. Now, you are the staff. You got to take care of it all. But IEEE helped in that development. The thought of how you brought together the fiduciary side along with all the political side, and make it work so that you can do something. IEEE has been an incubator, a chance to just try ideas out and see where they go. Sometimes they're successful. For the most part, I've enjoyed great success at IEEE. There have been some things that I don't talk about much that weren't successful.
Geselowitz:
We will leave them off the tape.
Gowen:
[Laughter] They're not on the tape.
Anyway, I have always tried to do the unusual step, go someplace where others aren't, go on the road less walked, and see what you can do. IEEE has provided that. When I'm meeting with young people that are thinking about IEEE, I say, you want to do this because you can't get this experience in really any other arena. IEEE can be gracious. It can be forgiving. For the most part, we are not out to hurt anybody. If something does not work, we just sort of move you off to the side, so it's not a very high price you pay. But in industry or in your academic career or your government career, it could be a high price. It is a great way to learn how you work.
I appreciate you providing me with an opportunity to tell my story. Also, I have not had the chance, but I know what you've been doing with First-Hand Histories on the Global History Network [GHN]. [Later, GHN became ETHW, Engineering and Technology History Wiki.]
Geselowitz:
Yes, and it is going great.
Gowen:
God sakes keep it up and just keep it moving. If I can help you in any way, I will.
Geselowitz:
We appreciate it, and thanks very much for this wonderful interview.
