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Gordon Slemon was a visionary engineer
« on: 2011-10-23 18:04:53 » |
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Someone that made a difference and will be missed.
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Fritz
Gordon Slemon, 87
Visionary engineering professor worked to link the ivory tower with the factory floor
Source: The Globe & Mail
Author: ron csillag
Date: 2011.10.20
Gordon Slemon was a visionary engineer who recognized the need and market for electric cars and magnetic trains long before they were considered “green.” He was also a hard-nosed realist who believed that if universities were going to continue graduating engineers of any ability, they had better look beyond government for more money.
Recognized worldwide as an authority on the analysis, design and development of electric machines and controlled drive systems, his main research focus was magnetics as applied to electric machinery. He made major contributions to the development of permanent magnet motors and high-speed, magnetically levitated and propelled interurban vehicles.
Slemon died in Toronto on Sept. 26 of natural causes. He was 87.
As an engineering professor at the University of Toronto, where he served as dean of Applied Science and Engineering from 1979 to 1986, he was loud and clear in his warnings that government funding cuts were resulting in universities that were ill-equipped to provide training on modern equipment with modern techniques.
“We in engineering schools are woefully short of resources because of budget constraints,” he told The Globe and Mail in 1982. “We need to get into arrangements which are income earners because we're not getting the resources we need from the provincial government.”
Slemon's pleas got the attention of David Peterson, then leader of the Ontario Liberal Party, who rose in the legislature in 1982 to warn that professional associations were threatening not to recognize graduates of Ontario engineering programs because they had insufficient experience with new technology. Peterson demanded the province boost financing for engineering schools.
This put the governing Conservatives on the defensive. Education minister Bette Stephenson said she would withhold comment until she'd asked the Association of Professional Engineers of Ontario for a copy of a confidential memo it had sent to Slemon. Meantime, engineering faculties were already financed at double the rate of some arts programs, she argued, and the government's Board of Industrial Leadership and Development had spent $10-million on research in engineering and technology.
Slemon was unimpressed. As soon as he became dean, “it was clear to him, and no doubt to many others, that the faculty had to take steps to ensure its own survival,” says The Skule Story, a published history of the University of Toronto's engineering department. Against rising enrolment and a decline in government funding of about 10 per cent over the previous five years, Slemon stated bluntly that the “time had passed when we can reliably count on public funding” for the engineering faculty. Instead, “among the resources on which we must increasingly call,” he is quoted in the history, “are industries which employ our graduates and incorporate the results of our research, alumni who have benefited in their careers from their engineering education, and engineering students who contribute through their tuition fees.”
In 1980, the University of Toronto unveiled its Innovations Foundation, with no government support, to market U of T inventions, products and processes. “Industry should come to the universities for ideas, but it doesn't,” Slemon, the foundation's first chairman, noted at the time. “So we are going to them. We've got a lot of exciting things.” Among them were an implantable voice box for people whose speech was destroyed by disease, and an early example of an energy-saving fluorescent light.
“A very big part of his contribution was not just the technical side,” noted Safwat Zaky, an engineering professor Slemon hired in 1973. “He was a very strong proponent of universities and industry working together.”
Slemon was a consultant to some 70 companies and organizations nationally and internationally. He served as a Canadian technical adviser under the Colombo Plan, a 26-nation postwar effort to strengthen the economic and social development of countries in the Asia-Pacific Region, and he helped set up engineering programs at colleges, universities and technical institutes in India, China, Cuba and Saudi Arabia.
(A deal Slemon's department inked with the Saudis in the early 1980s on exchange of students and research raised the ire of some women at U of T, who pointed out that in Saudi Arabia, female university students were relegated to separate rooms that broadcast lectures via closed-circuit television, and besides, were forbidden to study engineering.)
In Canada, he established IDEA Corp., designed to find innovative ideas and, linking business, labour and universities, to turn them into commercial opportunities. He co-founded Inverpower Controls Ltd., a power supply manufacturer, and helped establish Vehicle Research Ltd., set up to build an electric car. It was 1970, and the oil crisis was an emerging topic, so Slemon and three colleagues each kicked in $5,000 to develop a prototype. The result was a low-slung, sporty two-seater painted an eye-catching yellow – “a thing of beauty, in our eyes at least,” he wrote in his unpublished, 458-page memoir titled Did I Ever Tell You ...
With a range of just 80 kilometres in the city, the car was weighed down by the only batteries available at the time – large, heavy, lead acid types, and it took 12 of them to power the vehicle. The car worked, but the only attention it received was from the media.
A few years later, Canada's Department of Transport encouraged engineers from U of T, Queen's and McGill universities to develop a Canadian take on a magnetically levitated, high-speed train, meaning a much more economical approach than was being tested in Japan and Germany. Slemon and his team came up with a 100-passenger carriage about the size of a Boeing 727 with an array of superconducting magnets along its outer edges.
“Just imagine a vehicle,” he wrote, “travelling at 500 kilometres an hour over an elevated flat-topped track with a visible clearance of about 10 centimetres, no apparent means of keeping it on track, no jet motors or wheels to provide propulsion, and with no cab for a driver. We were probably victims of our own ingenuity, since most people would not believe it could possibly be safe.”
A prototype tested on a track in Kingston was successful, but “western society had again become accustomed to higher oil prices,” Slemon recalled in his memoirs, and the train was largely forgotten. But some of those early innovations found their way into later “maglev” trains now running in China, Japan and Korea.
Gordon Richard Slemon was born in Bowmanville, Ont., on Aug. 15, 1924, to Selena Johns and Milton Slemon. The family later moved to a farm with no electricity in the village of Haydon, Ont., where young Gordon was home-schooled. His mother died when he was 10 and the lad earned pocket money by performing magic tricks at parties and selling photographs to Toronto newspapers.
He completed bachelors and masters degrees in electrical engineering at the University of Toronto, followed by doctorates, one in 1952 and another in 1968, from the University of London. He joined the University of Toronto in 1955.
He played a key role in the establishment and early operation of the Canadian Academy of Engineering and was its president in 1998. He was elected a fellow of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers and of the Engineering Institute of Canada, whose highest award, the Sir John Kennedy Medal, he received earlier this year.
There was a slew of other laurels, including the Nikola Tesla Award in 1990 and in 1995, the Order of Canada.
He owned some 150 patents, but was more focused on their practical applications and the teachable moments they could generate.
“He was ahead of his time on what universities now call experience-based learning,” said his son Stephen, an English and film professor. “All the things he did were really high-end student involvement projects.
“He also believed that science and finance ought to be in robust conversation with each other and he thought it was the responsibility of engineers who wore that iron ring to tell corporations not just how to make money now, but what is likely to happen 10 years from now. … He tried to see ahead to those things. It was unsurprising that he was pushing innovations that were before their time.”
Slemon leaves Jean (née Matheson), his wife of 62 years, four children and nine grandchildren.
Special to The Globe and Mail
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