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r~

Remember when? ... Andwell help you

remember who!

\,--

,X rW^

* / U f-?c

v l l ^ ' • * * .

And if you'll do your pan. we'll help others remember you, too.

The 1990 Georgia Tech Alumni Directory is now available. As the most up-to-date list of all living alumni, it will be an invaluable resource.

Only the number of directories ordered will be printed, so send your request for either a

hardbound or softbound copy right away—and relive those Rambltn' Wreck memories with old friends.

Theim GeorgfaTech Alumni Drawing together good friends and good memories*

(BORGIA TECH VOL. 66 NO. i Alumni Magazine . SUMMER 1990

STAFF John C. Dunn, editor Gary Goetding, associate

editor Gary Meek, Margaret Barrett

photography Everett Hullum, design Wayne Parker, advertising

PUBUCAIIONS COMMITrEE

George A. Stewart Jr. '69, chairman

W. Guy Arledge 71 Hugh A. Carter '64 Jack J. Faussemagne '65 Frank H. Maier Jr. '60 L. Gordon Sawyer '46

Georgia Tech Alumni Magazine is published quarterly for Roll Call contributors by the Georgia Tech Alumni Association. Send cot tespondence and changes of address to: GEORGIA TECH ALUMNI MAGAZINE Alumni Faculty House 225 North Avenue NW Atlanta. GA 30332-0175 Editorial: (404) 894-4646 Advertising: (404) 894-2391 Fax: ( i lk) 894-5113

On the Cover: The father of night vision, Oscar Cleaver, EE '28, was also a genius in lighting, working on stage productions and the movie, "Gone with the Wind."Learn more about Tech inventors' contributions to American life beginning on page 23. Illustration by Tim Williams

CQIVIFNTS h\

Technology at Home **. Technology Park's Charles Brown makes high-tech companies feel at home • Written by Sam Heys

15

DreamMakers 23 Tech inventors and their "better mousetraps" • Compiled by John Dunn

A Student's Notes from Soviet Georgia 34 Life's different, and the same, for students • Written by David Nelson

Renewal in Rome 38 Under a government program and with a strong Tech influence, 27 "Main Streets" are experiencing revivals • Written by Lisa Crowe

Parker Petit of Heatthdyne, p. 27

T)EPAiaiMENii$

Letters 5 No fair comparison; Wyckoff remembered; NCAA trip.

Technote s 6 Alumni Association repeats as #1; Antarctic tours; speedy Ramblin' wrecks; recycling; yearbook frisbees; Crecine on research panel; a van needed.

Research 4 6 Biomass from wood scraps; leaky heart valves; chaos in chemical reactions.

Profi le . . . . . 50 Ivan Allen: The man too busy to hate.

© 1990 Georgia Tech Alumni Association

GEORGIA TECH • Contents 3

':-<-

I

OFFICIAL SPONSOR ALUMNI MAGAZINE

A

A CLASS BY OURSELVES. You'd be surprised how many tech

grads you meet at Scientific-Atlanta.

Which we think says all that needs to

be said about the quality of our people.

And the quality of our technology.

If you're interested in creating com­

munications systems and equipment that

redefine the limits of possibility, talk to

us. We think you'll find we're a class act.

To learn more about Scientific-

Atlanta's career opportunities, send your

resume to: SCIENTIFIC-ATLANTA, Central

Employment, RO. Box 105027, Dept. TT,

Atlanta, GA 30348

An Equal Oppor­

tunity Employer.

Scientific Atlanta

JETTERS

Comparison Between Carter, Reagan Unnecessary • i

Editor: As an admirer of Sen.

Sam Nunn. I am com­pelled to comment on his unnecessary and totally political comparison be­tween President Ronald Reagan and President Jimmy Carter ["A Conver­sation with Sam Nunn," Spring 1990].

I am personally con­vinced that both presi­dents did the very best job they could, and that fortu­nately or unfortunately, Reagan made an impact that changed the course of this nation and Carter did not.

If the Japanese are will­ing to return some of our U.S. dollars to us by pay­ing Reagan for speaking, more power to him and us. If Carter can get such an offer, he should accept it willingly and bring some more U.S. dollars back to us. If Carter wanted to, he could even use these funds to purchase supplies and material for the people of Africa or, even better in my opinion, to provide funds for the street people of Atlanta and Richmond.

S. Joseph Ward, IM '51 Richmond, Va.

No Comparison Editor:

I am very upset with the article in your maga­

zine comparing Ronald Reagan with Jimmy Carter ["A Conversation with Sam Nunn," Spring 1990].

What kinds of men and women are graduates of Georgia Tech? Are they usually men and women who are successful in busi­ness, or are they people who give their time and knowledge as volunteers in hospitals and shelters for the homeless?

If Reagan, at age 79, can still get paid $2 mil­lion, I say, more power to him.

Reagan was one of the greatest presidents this country has ever had. How dare you compare him to Carter?

Dora S. Sowell Soddy-Daisy, Tenn.

Sam Nunn, Content Made Excellent Issue Editor:

I wish to express my thoughts regarding the ex­cellence of the content of

the Spring 1990 edition of the GEORGIA TECH ALUMNI

MAGAZINE.

Like many others, no doubt, I am deluged with a wide variety of publica­tions attempting to state the many problems facing our nation today and out­lining their solutions. All recite the same half-baked ideas and the same vague solutions.

The interview with Sam Nunn and the comments of various foreign students went a long way toward pin-pointing the problems confronting us in today's world. These articles filled in many missing gaps and provided a more precise appreciation of those problems. I look forward to receiving future editions of the alumni magazine.

Philip W. Hutton, Cls '27

Hampton, Va.

Wyckoff Remembered As Inspiring Teacher Editor:

What a delight it was to read the article in the alumni magazine that brought us up-to-date on Dr. Hugh A. Wyckoff ["At 100, Wyckoff Thanks Lucky Genes," Spring 1990].

I well remember him as one of my favorite teach­ers, and the excellent biol­ogy laboratory course he

taught. I am sure that I am but one of hundreds of students who not only learned important technical information from him, but were also inspired to pur­sue careers in the public health field.

Dr. Dade W. Moeller, CE '47, MS SANE '48

Associate dean for con­tinuing education

Harvard School of Public Health

Boston

NCAA Basketball Trips Were Enjoyable Events Editor:

The Georgia Tech Alumni Association and Athletic Association did a good job in arranging the NCAA basketball trips. A lot of credit should go to Alumni Executive Director John Carter and the Ath­letic Association's Kevin Bryant for their efforts un­der sometimes-difficult cir­cumstances. It surely was a lot of fun.

Charles D. MoseleyJr., IE'65

Atlanta

GEORGIA TECH ALUMNI

MAGAZINE welcomes letters from readers. Send corre­spondence to Editor, GEORGIA TECH ALUMNI

MAGAZINE, Alumni/Faculty House, 190 North Avenue, Atlanta. GA 30332-0175.

GEORGIA TECH • letters 5

TTiCHNQTES

Coining Back for Seconds For the second year in a row, the Georgia Tech Alumni Association has received the Grand Gold Medal Award, honoring it as the top alumni associa­tion in the country. The award is presented by the Council for the Advance­ment and Support of Edu­cation, based in Washing­ton, D.C.

The Grand Gold Medal, which was announced by President John P. Crecine at the Presidents' Dinner on May 11, carries a $1,000 prize sponsored by the Ford Motor Co. Fund. Alumni Association Presi­dent Oliver H. Sale Jr., ME

'56, and Executive Director John B. Carter Jr., IE '69, accepted Crecine's con­gratulations at the annual dinner.

The award recognizes the the most outstanding alumni relations program in the country.

Entrants in the annual competition were judged on the basis of "good planning, careful budget­ing, effective use of re­sources, and evidence of successful results" in their respective alumni pro­grams.

"To win the Grand Gold Award once is in­credible, but to win it

twice in a row is unbeliev­able," said Carter.

He added that alumni involvement with Tech was a major factor in win­ning the award.

"We involve 50 percent of our alumni in at least one ac­tivity a year," he said. "And 30 percent of our alumni con­tribute to the Roll Call in support of academics—to the best of our knowledge, that's tops in the nation among public institutions."

Alumni Win Top Award for

Second Consecutive Year

THE SECOND TIME AROUND. Alumni Association President Oliver Sale displays a gold plate signifying the Alumni Association's Grand Gold Award. He is flanked by Tech President John P. Crecine (left) and John Carter, Alumni Association executive director.

Presidents' Dinner Fetes Contributors More than 650 Georgia Tech contributors attended the Presidents' Dinner on

May 11 at the Waverly Hotel in Marietta. The annual black tie affair hon­

ors contributors of $1,000 and more to the Roll Call. Faculty/Staff Fund con­tributors at the Thousand Club level and above were also recognized.

At the beginning of the program, President John P. Crecine announced that for the second straight year, the Alumni Associa­tion had won a Grand Gold Award for excellence in its alumni relations pro­grams. President Oliver H. Sale Jr., ME '56, and Ex­ecutive Director John B. Carter Jr., IE '69. accepted Crecine's congratulations on behalf of the Alumni Association.

The Georgia lech Band and Georgia Tech Orches­tra provided musical enter­tainment for the event. Students from the Georgia Tech Student Foundation, Student Alumni Associa­tion and the Ambassadors were also in attendance.

Technotes coiilitiuedpage 8

6 GEORGIA TECH • Summer 90

JKHNOT1S From Page 6

Antarctic Voyage Heads 1991 Tours The list of tours for next year has been finalized, according to Janice Sang-ster, director of tours for the Alumni Association.

The 1991 offerings in­clude a cruise to Antarctica Feb. 1-15, and an Elbe River cruise July 13-26

For more information about the tour program, contact Janice Sangster Georgia Tech Alumni Association, 190 North Avenue, Atlanta. GA 30332-0175.

with an Eastern Europe itinerary.

Other tours available to alumni include a Trans-Panama trip Feb. 26-March 8; "Wings Over the Nile" March 2-14; a Lisbon to Venice cruise aboard the Crown Odyssey May 4-18; a "Dutch Waterways Ad­venture" June 2-16, featur­ing three nights in Paris and three nights in Gene­va; and an Eastern Canada cruise from New York to

Montreal Sept. 9-19 aboard the Royal Princess.

Details about the 1991 travel opportunities will be

published in future alumni publications and will also be sent to prevk >us tour participants.

Speedy Ramblin' Wrecks

Black Grad Students Form Organization The newest campus group to be chartered by the Student Government Association is the Black Gradu­ate Student Association. The purpose of the organi­zation, as expressed in its bylaws, is to "promote the cohesiveness and success of its members at Tech." The document states further that BGSA plans to raise cultural awareness and enhance the technical devel­opment of its members, and provide academic and social support.

A whole lot of shaking, rattling, and rolling was going on as the Woodruff School of Mechanical Engi­neering chapter of Pi Tau Sigma, the ME honorary society, hosted the first annual Georgia Tech Ramblin' Wreck Design Contest on May 12.

The competition fea­tured 27 entries from area high school students.

The object of the con­test was to create a vehicle that could travel down a 40-foot-long inclined ramp in the shortest time.

Vehicles could not ex­ceed 18 inches in any di­

rection, weigh more than 10 pounds, contain electri­cal or incendiary devices or toxic chemicals, have remote control or contact during the race, be bought commercially, or be pushed or held during the release.

Stephen Kim, a student at Fayette County High School, won first place honors and a S75 prize.

Several mechanical en­gineering faculty members were also on hand to talk to the students about Georgia Tech and engi­neering as a career.

Technotes continued page 11

Georgia Tech Alumni Association Officers Oliver H. Sale Jr. '56

president B. loe Anderson '50

past president Shirley C. Mewborn '56

president-elect/treasurer lolm C. Staton )r.; '60

vice pn :sidei it act it •itics H, Hammond Stithjr. '58

vice president-communications G. William Knight '62 '68

vice president-Roll Call fohll B. Carter )r. '69

vice president/executive director lames M. Langley

vice president

Trustees Thomas A. Barrow Jr. '48 James D. Bliteh III '53 Hugh A. Carter Jr. '64 Stanley L. Daniels '60 II. Guy Darnell Jr. '65 Joseph T. Dyer '69 II. Allen Ecker'57 '58 Edwin C. Eekles '52 Jack J. Eaussemagne '65 Hal W. Field '51 Frank B, Fortson 71 Samuel 0 , Franklin III '65 Thomas B, Gurley '59 P. Owen Herein Jr. 70

Brian D. I iogg '61 James R. Jolly '64 G. Paul Jones (r. '52 James R. Lientz |r. '65 Frank II. Maierjr. '60 Ronald L. Martin '68 Robert E. Mason '60 Patriae M. Perkins-Hooker '80 lames Richard Rolrerts III 69 L. Gordon Sawyer Sr. '46 V. Hawley Smith |r. '68 W. Clayton Sparrow Jr. '68 Francis M. Spears 73 '80 George A. Stewart '69 II. Milton Stewart Jr. '61 S. Joseph Ward '51

8 GEORGIA TECH • Summer 90

EVERY TIME YOU CHARGE, MAKE A

ALUMNI ASSOCIATION

I208CS GEORGE P GA TECH AlTnWT

SHOWYOUR Carry the prestige card that shows your Tech colors and benefits the schoc > 1! The Alumni Association/C&S VISA and Master­card.

In addition to providing you all the great benefits of conven­tional MSA and Mastercard credit cards, the Georgia Tech Prestige Card also shows your support of your alma mater.

C&S National Bank, which issues the card, will donate one

TECHCX)LORS! half of the $12.00 annual fee to the Alumni Association. And every time

you use the card, a portion of the purchase amount will also be contributed.

To receive your application for your special Georgia Tech VISA or Mastercard, call the Murnni Association. Then show off your Tech colors every time you use your credit card. 404/894-2391

A • When it's a contribution to Charitable Life!

Georgia Tech Charitable Life, Inc. ensures a lot of Tech's future for just a little money. Through the Charitable Life program, you can arrange for Tech to be the beneficiary of a $50,000 life insur­ance pohcy for premiums as low as $2.81 per day or less, depending on your age.

You can use this cost-effective method to support the Georgia Tech Foundation, Inc. and/or the Alexander-Tharpe Fund, Inc. Your gift helps guarantee a generous endowment for Georgia Tech.

Tuition at Georgia Tech turned out to be one of your best investments; now, make a good investment in the future of Georgia Tech through the Charitable Life program.

Yes! I would like to learn more about Georgia Tech Charitable Life.

• • Alumnus or friend • Insurance agent

Name.

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Return this card to: William T.Lee Executive Director Georgia Tech Charitable Life, Inc. Georgia Institute of Technology Atlanta, Georgia 30332-0220 or call (404) 894-4678

ujjHdHNonas From Page 8

Forum Promotes Recycling The Environmental Forum of Georgia Tech hopes to expand its recycling pro­gram this fall, according to mechanical engineering student and forum mem­ber Todd Smiley. For the past year, the student group has maintained re­ceptacles (>n the parking lot side of the Student Center for glass, computer paper and aluminum. Newsprint is collected at a bin located behind Caldwell Residence Hall.

The current setup is too small to handle the amount of materials that

Tojind out what's happening at Georgia Tech, call the 24-hour Buzz Hotline.

students and staff bring, according to Smiley. The forum hopes to establish a permanent, centrally lo­cated recycling site with larger bins that would be more visible than the steel drums that currently serve as receptacles, he said.

"We would also like to increase residence halls' participation by having bins located in or near the

dorms," he added. Forum members are

also working with a local office waste recycler and faculty and staff at Tech to draw u p a proposal for campus-wide collection of white office paper and computer paper.

The Environmental Fo­rum meets every Thursday at 11 a.m. in room 320 of the Student Center.

Yearbooks Are Versatile Noting that college yearbooks generate excitement for

a few days but then are relegated to gathering dust on a bookshelf, the Technique has offered several ways to get the most value from the annual. The following list is from "90 Uses for Your '90 Blueprint."

1. Beer keg stand. 2. Frisbees for pit bulls. 3. Space shuttle tiles. 4. Personal flotation devices. 5. Wedding gift for ex-boyfriend or ex-girlfriend.

Tech's Crecine Named to Research Panel

President John P. Crecine has been ap­pointed to a committee of seven university presidents that will direct a year-long con­gressional-university colloquium.

The colloquium will review U.S. government policies and procedures relating to science re­search facilities, accord­ing to U.S. Sen. Terry Sanford (D, N.C.), co-chairman of the collo­quium. The group will also study the tendency in Congress to eamiark science and research funds for designated universities without competitive review.

Technotes continued page 12

Thank you to the official sponsors of the

GEORGIA TECH ALUMNI MAGAZINE

• Acme Business Products

• Ball Stalker

• C&SBajik

• The Coca-Cola Company

• Delta Air lines

• Dodson Interna­tional Air

• First Atlanta

• Hyatt Regency Ravinia

• Hyatt Regency Suites

• Ritz-Carlton, Atlanta

• Ritz-Carlton, Buckhead

Scientific-Atlanta

Technology Park/Atlanta

Wyndham Hotel

GEORGIA TECH • Technotes 11

qfECHNOjvTfi From Page 11

A v a n away from self-sufficiency written by omger pmhokter Larry Howard was 16 years old when, in 1970, he dove into Lake Lanier and hit his head on a stump. Since then, he has relied on wheelchairs, adaptive aids, and a cus­tomized van for mobility.

The accident hasn't pre­vented Howard from lead­ing a productive, semi-independent life. A com­puter programmer, he works at Georgia Tech's Center for Rehabilitation Technology (CRT), where engineers are designing systems to remove some

of the barriers that can frustrate disabled people.

The CRT staff creates systems and devices such as "AbleOffice," a modular workstation that helps mo­bility-impaired people per-fonn basic office tasks. Howard's design recom­mendations have been in­valuable, according to CRT Director Jim Toler.

Howard is a C5 quad­riplegic, and has limited hand dexterity and some upper-body strength. He can use a mouthstick to push electronic buttons.

When Howard began using AbleOffice, his pro­ductivity increased by 25 percent in just two weeks. The system also provides him with greater self-suffi­ciency, important for Howard, who lives with his parents but realizes that he will be cm his own someday and must be able to support himself.

Although Howard has been greatly assisted by one form of technology, the failure of another has jeopardized his ability to work. Howard's specially-

equipped 197a van is no longer operable, and he has been forced to work at home. CRT is now collect­ing tax-deductible contri­butions to help pay for a new van, valued at about $15,000 (a donated vehicle is also welcome).

If CRT obtains a van, the state will pay for wheelchair lift and driving modifications. For informa-tion, contact Tom Ganna-way, CRT, Centennial Re­search Building. Suite 311, Atlanta, GA 30332-0130; (404) 876-8580. •

Let 26,000 Georgia Tech Alumni and Friends

Know Your Business.

t T-iAVJI I Vx>h. \ wo I n i<y>i HJ-L dJTiPfr. A T I fb r£^l/Xo\>r^Frr

J

Whether your business is a service or a product, the Georgia Tech Alumni Magazine can help you get the word out. The Georgia Tech Alumni Magazine is received quarterly by thousands of people interested in know­ing about your business. With the wide

variety of our readers, wonderful things can happen by placing an advertisement with us.

For more information on letting us pro­mote your business, please call Wayne Parker at (404) 894-2391.

12 GEORGIA TECH • Summer 90

TAKING CARE OF THIS GENERATION. AND THE NEXT

/ i

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It takes more than love and good intentions to support and raise a family. You have to be smart, plan ahead, and

make tough financial decisions.

C&S Bank is here to work with you every step of the way, from the time you first start out, to well

after you retire.

We'll help you pay bills, buy a car or a house, send your kids to college,

save for your retirement, and plan your estate to protect those you do things for.

We've helped families for over a hundred years. And we'll help yours. W I r T c J x t l / Y v l L J

From this generation to the next. D I T Y E A J I N V J

LENDER ©1991) I he Ci t izens and S o u t h e r n C o r p o r a t i o n . M e m b e r F D I C . I TECH I

OFFICIAL SPONSOR ALUMNI MAGAZINE

A DEGREE — FROM TECH CAN OPEN

A LOT OF DOORS.

K

[he Ritz-Carlton, Atlanta is offering a special rate for Yellow Jacket fans. Just $100 per room per night, subject to availability. Join us at Peachtree and Ellis Streets for the city s finest accommoda­tions. Luxurious rooms. Gourmet dining. An elegant bar. Impeccable sewice. And an obsession for detail that shows in everything here. From fine art to fresh cut flowers throughout the hotel. For reservations, please call 404-659-0400 or 800-241-3333. Our doors are wide open for you. THE RITZ-CARLTON

ATLANTA

At Home T'he

amazing thing

about Technol­ogy Park," says its president, Charles R. Brown, "was that more than 25 years ago there were people who un­derstood how the economy was going to become service-oriented—and that Atlanta was g< )ing to be very important to that changing economy." Brown, a 1962 graduate in building constmction, stands at the wall-to-wall window in his 31st-floor office across from Lenox Square. Below him is the brown, upturned earth of the next, would-be Technology Park. Its name is Lenox Park.

Yes, Technology Park has grown up and has its own offspring. But whereas Technology Park was high-tech gone suburban—all the way to then-uninhabited Peachtree Comers— Lenox Park is a bold, new, mixed-use adven­

ture inside Atlan­ta's perimeter. And unlike Tech­nology Park, it has had Brown's name on it from the start.

"Technology Park was in­tended to show that technically oriented service industries could operate profit­ably in this area," says the 52-year-old Brown, who became presi­dent in 1978. "It was a proto­type."

It was an idea conceived in the 1960s by Tech alumni who were concerned by the num­ber of Tech graduates who were having to leave the state to land a job—an exodus they called "the brain drain."

The impetus for its creation came from alumnus Paul Duke, a 1945 mechanical engi­neering graduate, then a member of the Geor­gia Tech National Advisory Board. In 1967, he convinced 16 other investors to raise $1.7 mil­lion to develop a high-tech business center that

Continued next page

In promoting an environment in which high-tech can thrive, Tech grad Charles Brown has been an innovator as

well as an entrepreneur.

W R I T T E N B Y S A M H E Y S P H O T O G R A P H Y B Y G A R Y M E E K

GEORGIA TECH • Technology Park 1 5

would raise funds for the Georgia Tech Foun­dation and supply local jobs for graduates in high-tech fields.

Duke's goal was to create a planned com­munity where people could live, work and play in the same quality-controlled environ­ment. He coaxed top developers from across the nation to bring their projects to Peachtree Comers. But after a promising start in 1971, the recession of the mid-1970s drove land prices down, and Technology Park came within weeks of being closed by the banks.

Enter Brown, who says Tech­nology Park was actually begin­ning to turn around before his arrival. Re­gardless, it has taken off under his leadership. More than 6,000 people now work in the 40 buildings dotting the 600-acre development in northwest Gwin­nett County. They are employed by 70 compa­nies, including Scientific-Atlanta and Hayes Mi­crocomputer Products Inc.

Georgia Trend magazine calls the 52-year-old Brown one of the state's 100 most influen­tial people, and one of the top four in the field

AT*"! Sn* > • . * •

l * %

TECHNOLOGY PARK S ENTRANCE. RIGHT: THE HOME OF HAYES MICROCOMPUTERS.

of commercial real estate. He was hailed as the man who "brought the office park concept in­side the perimeter" with Lenox Park, which won the 1989 Design of the Year Award from the National Association of Office and Indus­trial Parks.

Brown lives in Duluth with his wife, Brenda Jones Brown, an accomplished organist and pianist. Their two sons, Jeff, 23, and Scott, 19, are Mercer University and Furman University students, respectively. Brown serves on the board of trustees of the Georgia Tech Founda­tion, the Atlanta Arts Alliance and the Gwinnett Foundation.

Immediate past chairman of the Business

Council of Georgia, Brown is a relentless booster of Atlanta—Technology Park recently won the Governor's Award for its contribution to Atlanta's economic development. "Every dog has its day, every place its time, and there's no doubt now is the time and this is the place," Brown says with a salesman's con­viction. Although architecture lured Brown to Tech, he left with a mastery in the art of the deal.

"My parents had money put aside for me to go to college, but they said they sure would appreciate me not using it," says Brown, whose father was an office manager and mother a teacher.

He sold cars, wholesal­ing them, selling

them to other students or anyone he could, buying them at auction, selling them at auc­tion. He also sold socks. White socks. He calls them his most profitable enterprise ever, "in­cluding real estate, as far as time spent."

Brown attended Tech in the late 1950s and early '60s. T-shirts, jeans and white socks were the uniform of the day. His

stepfather was a traveling salesman in north Georgia and Alabama, the empire of the textile mill outlet. "One clay he came home with some white socks," Brown says. "He said he paid 50 cents a dozen for them. I said, 'I'll take all you can get.'"

Eventually, the mills were sending the socks directly to Brown's dorm room—200 to 300 dozen at a time. They were "seconds" and unsized, so Brown would sort them until he had a dozen pair and then wrap a rubber band around them.

"I'd go into a fraternity house and start tak­ing orders," he says. "I'd pay 50 to 75 cents a

Continued next page

Uf!-J

,

i

The 52-year-old Brown has been hailed as the man who "brought the office park

concept inside the rj rimeter." 16 GEORGIA TECH • Summer 1990

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dozen and sell them for anything I could get— $1.75, $2.75, $3 a dozen. I was making 200 to 300 percent."

Now, among other things, Brown sells Tech. A major contributor and fund raiser, he was chainnan of the class of

1962's fund drive that raised $3.6 million dur­ing the Centennial Campaign, a record among all reunion classes (14 other classes, for ex­ample,, raised a combined $11.4 million). He personally sold Puggy Blackmon on becoming Georgia Tech's golf coach after the two worked together on the 1982 World Jun­ior Cup Tourna­ment at the At­lanta Athletic Club. (Black-mon's golf teams at Tech are con­sistently ranked in the top 20 nationally.)

Brown arrived at Tech via a circuitous, if creative, route. During his senior year at Chat­tanooga High School, he wrote the University of Tennessee. The letter read: "I'm a graduate of a Tennessee high school and I want to be an architect. I notice you don't have a school of architecture and I know it takes a while to get one. So I just wanted to let you know I was going to be there in the fall so you could get started on one."

Brown remembers the reply: "They told me they weren't going to build a school for me, so I wrote them back and told them, 'Well, at least you ought to pay for me going to Geor­gia Tech.' And do you know they wrote back and said, Well, you may have a point there.'"

Brown's out-of-slate tuition at Tech was paid by the state of Tennessee. Three decades later, he speaks of his days as a Tech student with a self-deprecating sense of humor. "I tell people I took Calculus 808," he says. "That's

Continued page 20

-

John's Creek and Lenox Park are two developments

now under construction. 1 8 GEORGIA TECH • Summer 1990

GEORGIA TECH • Technology Park 1 9

202 four times. For me, it was graduate calcu­lus. I had to take it to graduate."

After earning his building construction de­gree in the College of Architecture, Brown spent only six weeks in the career. The late D. A. Polychrone, a Tech architecture professor, gave him his first job, short-lived though it was. "I told him," says Brown, "'I've spent five years of my life studying this stuff and I'm sure not going to waste the rest of it by practicing it.' And he said, Tm glad you said that because I was just getting ready to fire you because you're the worst archi­tectural engineer I've ever seen.'"

rown

AMONG HIGH-TECH INDUSTRIES, A LOW-TECH QUACK HELPS PROVIDE AN APPEALING SETTING.

B : jumped into real

estate, dabbling in single-family construction just long enough to

learn he'd have less hassle in commercial real estate. He was as project manager of the Atlanta Hilton in the mid-1970s when Technol­ogy Park called. "I went from 500,000 square feet per acre at the Hilton to 10,000 square feet per acre at Technology Park," he says. "The tenants were also different, but I had gone to school with them so I understood them.

"People used to ask me where we ate at Peachtree Corners. Heck, most people brought their lunch back then. The service industry was just getting going, and we had a lot of ambi­tious people. Whether there was a nice restau­rant down the street didn't make that much difference."

What Brown found most attractive about Technology Park were the living conditions, so he figured others would like them, too. "The quality of life is important to these companies because it allows them to recruit and retain good people," he says. "Creative people add economic value toHfociety, and it's almost a requirement that they be provided with excep-

tional working conditions because they move to where they can do their best. If you want talent and the economic value it brings, you had better create a quality environment."

It's now known as Technology Park/Atlanta .and is a subsidiary of Denver Technological Center, which is owned by the London ship­ping firm European Ferries, PLC.

"The Georgia Tech Foundation did two im­portant things," says Brown. "First, it decided Technology Park needed to happen and al­

lowed it to. And then, a decade later, the foundation turned it loose so it could grow."

Lenox Park is just one of Technology-Park's two de­velopments un­der construc­tion. John's

Creek, the other, combines office, lab and light manufacturing in a low-density environ­ment. Straddling the Fulton-Forsyth county-line, John's Creek is projected to have 2,000 to 3,000 employees by early next year. Low-den­sity housing, retail stores, and a 300-acre golf course are included in the 1,700 acres.

Located on 165 acres, Lenox Park has been in the works for eight years and may take an­other 10 to complete. It will include 1.5 mil­lion square feet of accessory retail space. Built on the old Standard Club golf course, the de­velopment will feature a 25-acre lake, a park­like atmosphere, and a monorail connecting it to the Lenox MARTA station, a half-mile away.

Brown has become something of a technol­ogy match-maker, attracting high-tech compa­nies to settle in the stimulating surroundings of Technology Park. It has been a match with mutual benefits, which, Brown believes, is a winning combination well worth repeating. •

Sam Heys is an Atlanta writer. 5-391. I \ .

Technology Park's aesthetically pleasing environment—acres of greenery and lakes with ducks-

has proved a hire for creative companies. 2 0 GEORGIA TECH • Summer 1990

This shouldn't be the way you turn on your copier.

i.i

AND you shouldn't need a Masters of Engineering from Georgia Institute of ^ Technology to keep it in proper running order.

But these days, if you don't know how to rewire your Coronas or replace your exposure

ALL SERVICE

lamp, chances are your copier's down again. Now rather than accept copier breakdowns as inevitable, you have a choice. You can pick up the phone and call your service technician for the umpteenth time.

Or call your local Acme rep resentative for the very first time.

Before we show you the technology behind Ricoh's latest copiers, we'll inform you of the facts that stand in front

of them. Like the fact that

Ricoh is one of the largest manufacturers of copiers and

facsimile in the world. And the fact that Ricoh engineers work to

make certain that when you're on a deadline, your equipment's not on

downtime. Finally, we'll discuss a little some­

thing called commitment from Acme, a company with one of the most extensive ser­

vice networks we hope you never use. So, if you're having trouble keeping your

spirits up every time your copier's down, DO WHAT THE GEORGIA TECH ALUMNI ASSOCIATION

DID. Call Acme and ask about Ricoh. (Or call Tech's Admissions office, and ask for a student loan.)

With Ricoh products, Acme's 18 years experi­ence and 18 offices throughout the Southeast, ACME IS YOUR SAFE CHOICE IN COPIERS AND FACSIMILE!

n • T E C H m

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Ifellow Jackets get special savings at the Wyndham Midtown Atlanta. For just $55 on weekends and $72 weekdays* you can relive those college days. Only blocks from campus, we offer luxuriously appointed guest rooms and superb service. Pop­ular dining and entertainment. And the state-of-the-art Midtown Athletic Club. Call now for res­ervations at (404) 873-4800 or 800 822-4200. As Ramblin' Wrecks from Georgia Tech you get a helluva Wyndham deal! *Rates are per room, per night, based on availability.

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I N V E N T O R S F R O M T E C H Compiled by John Dunn • Photographed by Gary Meek

DREAM MAKERS

T Wallace Coulter and bis brother, Joe.

he fanciful image of the inventor, puttering in his basement workshop during his spare

time to make the discovery that will improve the world, can be as real as it is romantic.

• For proof, look no further than Wallace H. Coulter, a member of the class of 1934, whose

discovery of the Coulter Principle and invention of the Coulter Counter has provided medical

and industrial researchers with a fast, accurate method of counting cells and small particles.

• Coulter's initial experiment was conducted in a Chicago basement with rublrerbands,

cellophane and a sewing needle. More than it) years later. Coulter Electronics is the techno­

logical leader in hematology diagnostics with annual revenues of more than SsOO million. An

estimated 50,(KM) Coulter Counters are in operation in U.S. labs and Coulter has 20 separate

companies around the world. • Hut the inventor may just as well be a harried student.

aggravated at continually having to adjust windshield wipers during a rainstorm. Vision,

coupled with genius and perseverance, can make the dream reality. Inventors often see

when others do not. • Georgia Tech has its share of inventors among its alumni, professors

and students. Some of their inventions have become household names, others serve industry,

while others may remain novel concepts. • Take Tom Fallon's automatic windshield

w ipers: While at 'lech, Fallon, EE <S6, pursued the invention as a senior project. I sing an

infrared based system, he developed a device that automatically adjusts the speed of the

wipers, depending on how hard it rains. In addition to earning an "A" for the project, Fallon

sold the concept to a Detroit company. • It hasn't been marketed . . . yet. But maybe some­

day Fallon's invention will join a host of others from Tech. hike those on the following pages.

GEORGIA TECH • Inventors from Tech 2 3

T H E D R E A M M A K E R S

New inventions often come as solutions to what seem like—but

usually aren't—simple problems.

Coulter's Discovery Launches an Industry % V Tallace Coulter has

• • b e e n described as "probably the closest thing to an American backyard garage inventor you will find wearing the mantle of captain of industry."

A member of the class of 1934, Coulter studied electrical engineering at Tech before becoming a sales engineer, selling X-ray equipment to hospitals in the Far East. During World War II, he worked in electronics and electro­medical instrumentation in New York and Chicago.

In October 1948, Coul­ter discovered the Coulter Principle, the most widely used method for counting and sizing microscopic particles suspended in a fluid, and launched an in­dustry that has changed the world of diagnostic medical research.

Coulter's principle of

volumetric impedance calls upon the principle of displacement as a measure of volume. Blood cells are suspended in a conductive fluid into which electrodes are placed. As a blood cell passes through an aperture between the electrodes, it displaces its own volume of electrolyte, and there is a measurable change in the electrical resistance of

' the system. The change becomes a precise mea­sure of cell volume and makes possible three-di­mensional evaluation.

Discovery of the prin­ciple led to Coulter's in­vention of the Coulter Counter, an instrument that counts and sizes bio­logical cells and industrial particles at a rate of sev­eral thousand a second, as opposed to the time-consuming manual method

The Affordable Sponge

The sponge developed by Gerard E. "Red"

Murray is probably in your home. A 1939 chemical engineering graduate, Mur­ray and his associates de­veloped an affordable cel­lulose sponge out of mate­rial available in the public domain in 1946.

The product, the O-Celo cellulose sponge, is

the top-selling cellu­lose sponge in the world and is sold in every country. Murray sold his patent to General almost 40 years ago, and O-Celo continues to man­ufacture the product.

"The O-Celo plant started ;out with 3,000 square feet and now cov

used by a lab technician with a microscope. Coul­ter's first patent was ap­proved in 1953, and he and his brother, Joe, an electronic engineer, began the one-on-one production of the Coulter Counter cell and particle analyzer.

In 1958, the brothers incorporated Coulter Elec­tronics and Coulter Sales Corp.

The corporation has evolved into an industry dedicated to automation of the hematology laboratory, and the Coulter companies have continued to be the industry leader. Wallace Coulter is chairman of the board and Joe is president of Coulter Corp., a world­wide company with more than 5,000 employees working in

manufacturing facilities and sales, service and edu­cation operations.

Coulter used his prin­ciple and the first cell ana­lyzer to spawn an array of instrumentation, reagents and controls, not just in hematology, but also in industrial fine-particle counting, chemistry, and other related lab instru­mentation. The research led to the discovery of new parameters of cell opacity, which opened new avenues for cell clas­sification and analysis.

Coulter's expansion of biomedical research efforts in development of mono­clonal antibodies and flow cytometry systems repre­sents the beginning of the integration of three previ­

ously distinct disci­plines: hematology, immunology and flow cytometry.

10-CELoi SPONGE U U 4 l£C RUBBER

keeps logs and lum­ber from splitting as they dry. One of the

^ | leading sealants in

ers 150,000 square feet," he says. Murray also developed Anchorseal, a wax-emulsion sealant that

the logging and lumber industry, it is manufactured

by U-C Coatings Corp., which Murray

founded in 1971, and of which he is chairman of the board.

2 4 GEORGIA TECH • Summer 1990

Intelligent Modems

Dennis C. Hayes, a physics major and

member ol the class of 1973, developed the first "intelligent modem— modulator demodulator— a high-tech device that breaks clow n the distant e barrier between comput ers. As a student, Hayes participated in the co op program, working for AT&T Long Lines. As an employee of financial Data Sciences, he worked

on the first four-bit micro­processor for commercial use and later, at National Data Corp.. he managed operations of the commu­nications network staff.

I le recognized the need for a device to en­able personal computers to exchange data with other computers over telephone- lines, and knew the device had to be easy to use to gain ac­ceptance in the business

office. Working alter hours at home, he built the first intelligent, micro­processor-controlled mo­dem. The user could now issue commands from the

computer to the modem using the Hayes Standard AT Command Set.

In 1977, I laves formed l laves Microcomputer Products Inc., which has become the leader in the microcomputer m< idem market.

Ironing Away Carpet Problems

After his retirement ..from the U.S. Army

as a lieutenant colonel in 1961, Charles D. Burgess, a member of the class of 1933, went into the retail carpet business in Ma­con, Ga. He decided that there ought to be a better way of fitting carpet sec­tions together than the tedious method of hand-sewing, and in 1966 he began working on the problem.

His solution was the development of a carpet tape used to seam sec­tions of carpet together.

In 1968, Burgess re­ceived patents on his thermoplastic seaming tape and an iron, used to activate the hot melt. That same year he went into partnership with Griffin Industries.

Burgess died April 4, 1990, in Fort Walton Beach, Fla., at age 80. The Burgess system of carpet seaming revolu­tionized the procedure of carpet installation.

GEORGIA TECH • Inventors from Tech 25

T H E D R E A M M A K E R S

The inventions, from a new lubricant to less-polluting smokestacks, are all advances

in traditional ways of doing things.

The Product Became the Company

T'he late Reginald S. Fleet, a 1916

mechanical engineer­ing graduate, and his brother, Preston, were the largest stock­holders among seven founders of the WD-40 Co., which was incorporated in 1953 as Rocket Chemical Co. The firm developed WD-40, a lubricant and rust-arresting compound, as its only product, and in 1970 changed its name to WD-40 Co.

'Sandwich' Recipe Targets Acid Rain Source

Hair-Curling Experience

T'he late Arnold F. Willat, a 1907 electri­

cal engineering graduate, taught electrical engineer­ing at Stanford before starting his own manufac­turing business in San Francisco to manufacture two of his highly success­ful early inventions—a type of phonograph needle and a telephone-and-electrical cord coiler.

In the 1920s, he manu­factured hot-permanent wave machines for a large distributor. In 1932, he in­vented cold permanent waving and revolutionized the cosmetics industry.

iter work­ing on

the ingredi­ents for 10 years, Dr. Jack Winnick has cooked up an electro­chemical "sandwich" that could

eliminate sulphur dioxide, the

chief component of acid rain, from coal-fired industrial smoke­stacks.

Because the technology is in the final stages of de­velopment and projected to be comparatively inex­pensive, Winnick has re­ceived world-wide interest in his patented process.

"It's a whole new idea of treating flue gas," the chemical engineering pro­fessor says. Many coal-burning plants use liquid chemicals as scrubbers to remove sulphur dioxide, resulting in large quantities of waste sludge. "It's a mess; it's expensive," says

<Winnick. For the past decade,

Winnick has been devel­oping a process that would create an electro­chemical separation of sul­fur dioxide from smoke­stack emissions, using an electrolytic cell sand­wiched between two gas-

diffusion electrodes. "We use an electric field

to attract the sulfur dioxide out of the gas," Winnick explains. The flue gas con­taining sulphur dioxide flows by a charged plate that draws the sulphur molecules through an elec­trolytic membrane. The fully oxidized molecules come out as highly con­centrated sulphur trioxide that could yield such by­products as sulfuric acid or oleum—chemicals used to make fertilizer, paints, de­tergents and explosives. The flue gas, cleaned of sulphur dioxide, can be safely released into the atmosphere.

Winnick estimates his technology could reduce the cost of scrubbing a typical 500-megawatt power plant by 75 percent. In lab tests, the process has exceeded 99 percent efficiency, he says.

Winnick has identified the materials to make three of the four main components in his device, but the ideal material for the electrolytic cell matrix still hasn't been identified. He estimates that it will take two more years until his research, which is funded by the U.S. Depart­ment of Energy, is com­pleted and the device can be tested in a pilot-scale model.

2 6 GEORGIA TECH • Summer 1990

I N V E N T O R S F R O M T E C H

V

Cutting Edge

Aplea from an execu- * tive with a major

drugstore chain put Dr. Raymond Vito, professor in the School of Engineer­ing Science and Mechan­ics, onto a very basic "cut­ting edge" technology.

The executive was con­cerned with on-the-job in­juries employees suffered using utility knives to open

boxes of merchandise. Vito and Russell Boehm, ESM instrument maker, designed a utility knife with an automatic safety feature. The knife, using single-edged razor blades, was designed for opening cardboard boxes.

The blade is never ex­posed when the knife is not in use.

SmallTalk

Michael Levy introduced the world to the first hand-held

electronic language calculator in the late 1970s. Levy, a 1969 electrical en­gineering graduate, designed the first pocket-size language-conversion computer, which was unveiled by Lexicon in June 1978. The first Lexicon language computer could translate English re­ciprocally into 13 languages.

Levy is now president of the company.

High-Tech Health Care

The death of Parker H. Petit's six-month-

old son in 1970 of Sudden Infant Death Syndrome (SIDS), commonly known as crib death, changed Petit's life. A project man­ager at Lockheed-Georgia Co. in Marietta, Ga., Petit, ME '62, MS EM '64, began working on devices to monitor the breathing and heart rates of infants. In 1971, Petit quit his job and founded Healthdyne,

where he developed the world's first home physi­ological monitoring device, now used worldwide in the management of infants at risk for SIDS.

The Marietta-based firm has evolved into an inter­national corporation with more than 1,600 employ­ees. Healthdyne has be­come a leading supplier of high-tech services and de­vices for the home and health-care market.

GEORGIA TECH • Inventors from Tech 11

T H E D R E A M M A K E R S

Some inventors make only one new discovery—for others, one leads

to another and another.

Staying Power

The product that be­came Elmer's Glue-All

turned out to be Ashworth Stull's wedding present to himself. Stull, a 1937 chemistry graduate, found­ed American Resinous Chemical Corp. and per­sonally conducted the re­search effort to plasticize polyvinyl acetate, which became the "white glue." In August 1942, after at­tempting some 800 experi­ments, Stull was on the verge of giving up. On the afternoon before his wed­ding day, he decided to carry out one final ex­periment before drop­ping the project, get­ting married and go­ing on his hon­eymoon. When he returned from his honey­moon, Stull recalls, "that was the only stable prod­uct among 800." He sold his company to Borden Inc. in the mid-1950s and Ash Stull's white glue became "Elmer's Glue-All."

I

Magnified Opportunity

R ick Steenblik, a 1980 r

I

mechanical engineer­ing graduate now working with the Georgia Tech Re­search Institute, has devel­oped two creative inven­tions that so far have not realized commercial suc­cess. His latest invention, however, a new kind of microscope, has a waiting market.

When Steenblik un­veiled a spiral solar reflec­tor in 1981, it was featured on the covers of Science & Mechanics and Science

News magazines. He invented the

Georgia Tech Spiral Fresnel Reflector while still a student. Based on Fresnel

principles, the coiled solar energy de­vice was believed to have virtu­ally unlim­ited appli­cations, including cooking, water heating and pumping, absorp­tion, refrig­eration, pottery

firing and crop

drying. It is also believed to have industrial uses such as thermal or photo­voltaic power generation. But the spiral reflector has not taken off commer­cially.

Another Steenblik in­vention is a pair of 3-D glasses that use color to create a 3-D image from two-dimensional color graphics, photographs or illustrations.

Technically called chromostereoscopy be­cause the stereoscopic im­age is created by manipu­lating color, Steenblik is working with the Massa­chusetts Institute of Tech­nology to perfect the op­tics for mass production. The glasses could be used to give a 3-D effect to spe­cial television programs or cartoon shows, computer-generated images, laser shows and textbooks.

Steenblik's latest inven­tion—a low-cost, high-per­formance microscope— could be a marketer's dream come true.

Steenblik believes the microscope would be practically indestructible, have superior optics, and be so affordable that every child in a science class­room could have a per­sonal microscope.

Steenblik hopes to in­troduce the instrument be­fore the end of the year.

2 8 GEORGIA TECH • Summer 1990

I N V E N T O R S F R O M T E C H

GEORGIA TECH • Inventors from Tech 2 9

T H E D R E A M M A K E R S

New inventions reinforce the adage: If the mind can conceive it, someone

will figure a way to execute it.

Bright Lights, Einstein and Night Sight

Oscar P. Cleaver liter­ally wrote the book

on stage lighting and de­vised an automatic lighting system for theaters. After earning an electrical engi­neering degree from Tech in 1928, Cleaver began work on his master's de­gree in electrical engineer­ing at Yale University, with a minor in the School of Drama.

He developed an auto­matic lighting system for the theater, the modern version of which is used by the Metropolitan Opera in New York. He is co­author of Stage Lighting, which became the "bible" on professional stage light­ing. As an engineer with Westinghouse Electric Co.,

he developed the lighting system used by the com­pany in a spectacular light-and-fountain display that was a major attraction at the 1939 World's Fair. The same year, he was sent to Hollywood to assist in solving lighting problems involved with the filming of the motion picture epic "Gone With the Wind."

He was assigned as the company representative working with a team of renowned physicists in­cluding Niels Bohr, Albert Einstein and Robert Oppenheimer, and was present at the first atomic chain reaction experiment at the University of Chi­cago. His next assign­ment was as an assis­

tant working on the Man­hattan Project, which chose the Bloomfield, N.J., Westinghouse plant to study the separation of U-238 from uranium ore.

After the successful sep­aration of U-238 in 1942, he was sent to the Oak Ridge, Tenn., separation plant as the company liai­son, where his involve­ment required being in­ducted into the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers as a captain. Cleaver, who re­tired as a colonel, in 1963 became the civilian techni­

cal director of r t h e Engineer

Corps Re­search and

Develop­ment

Household Bleach

The late frank Mayo, Cls '23, was a chemical engineering student at lech

when he discovered how lo make chlo­rine stable. But it wasn't until he hail fi­nancial difficulties and had to drop out of Tech in 1923 that he began profiting from his discovery, As a dairy farmer, he found that he knew how to make a better, more stable chlorine lot sanitary purposes, and he was soon selling his product to other farmers. He strengthened his bleach and sold it to laundries and cotton mills, and developed household bleach, Today Mayo Chemical Co. manufactures approxi mately one million gallons of sodium hy­pochlorite bleach per year lor companies such as Clorox and Puree.

3 0 GEORGIA TECH • Summer 1990

Laboratories, and is recog­nized by the U.S. Depart­ment of Defense as the "Father of Night Vision." Cleaver said that night vi­sion technology has not only aided the military, but the FBI, Secret Service, po­lice—and sophisticated crooks! Beneficial uses of the technology have been advanced in medical diag­noses and experimentation, and as an aid to individuals with night blindness.

Cleaver also was re­sponsible for development of the military's first laser laboratory, initiating the military's first scientific in­vestigation of the laser, which resulted in the de­velopment of the ruby (crystal) laser.

Shhhhhh. . .

Steve Dalton, a junior electrical engineering

student from San Antonio, is inventor of a modem noise filter and president of his own company, Spin­naker Development Group. His product, the DigiFilter, is manufactured by BALLCo Inc.. of Snell-ville, Ga., which has a patent pending. Dalton says the noise filter allows modems to function on telephone pairs that previ­ously could not be used for reliable data transfer.

I N V E N T O R S F R O M T E C H

V

Saving Energy and Money

During the energy crunch of the 1970s,

Glen P. Robinson Jr. took early retirement as chair­man of the hoard of Scien­tific-Atlanta, the world leader in antenna instru­mentation and satellite communications, and founded E-Tech, a com­pany dedicated to devel­oping energy technology.

Robinson. PHYS '48, MS

PHYS '50, holds 35 patents in the fields of solar en­ergy, antenna systems and energy management. A fonner research engineer at Tech, he was one of the founders of Scientific-At­lanta in 1952, and served as its president until 1971, when he became chairman of the board.

"I like small companies, and I like to pioneer in

new areas," Robinson said of his decision to start afresh 12 years ago.

E-Tech's first product was a water-heating elec­tric heat pump that took heat and moisture out of the air, and replaced it with cool, dehumidified air. The device cut tradi­tional electric water-heat­ing bills by half. Its com­mercial and industrial ap­

plications include laun­dries, kitchens, hospitals and nursing homes.

One of the firm's latest products is a cost-saving heat pump for indoor swimming pools that also serves as a dehumidifier. The heat pump operates by removing humidity from the air and recover­ing heat, which is then used to help heat the pool.

GEORGIA TECH • Inventors from Tech 3 1

T H E D R E A M M A K E R S

New cinema systems and oil-well pumps are but two of the hundreds

of inventions front Tech people.

Not All Grasshoppers Jump "VVThen oilmen talk

• •about grasshoppers, they're talking business. Specifically, they're talking about Joseph P. Byrd's mechanical grasshopper: the Mark II, a beam-type oilfield pumping machine that has become the indus­try standard. Byrd, a 1938

general engineering gradu­ate, invented the Mark II more than 30 years ago.

During the 1976 U.S. bicentennial celebration, the Mark II was selected for permanent exhibition in the Smithsonian Institu­tion. Although the pump in the Smithsonian is the smallest unit in the line, it

is one of the largest man-made items in the mu­seum.

The largest Mark II is nearly 50 feet in height and is capable of produc­ing 8,000-9,000 barrels of oil a day.

There are more than 25,000 units operating in oil fields around the world.

,' ,• • .• > . . .

Something Missing? Do you know of an inventor with a Tech connection whose inven­tion should be recognized? Let us know for a future article. Send the name of the individual, the Tech connection and a brief de­scription of the invention to Editor, GEORGIA TECH ALUMNI MAGAZINE, Alumni/Faculty House, Atlanta, GA 30332-0175.

That's Show Biz

The late communica­tions pioneer Hazard

E. "Buzz" Reeves, a 1928 mechanical engineering graduate, developed one of the first systems to synchronize sound re­cordings directly onto film.

In 1937, he founded a firm to make acetate re­cording blanks for the music industry, which has since become a major manufacturer of magnetic tape. In 1946, he became a founder of Cinerama and developed the stereophonic sound sys­tem for the wraparound screen invention.

Paper Industry Legend

EJ. Justus, a 1948 mechanical engineer­

ing graduate, became a legend in the pulp and paper industry, receiving 122 U.S. patents for his inventions as well as many others in foreign countries.

Now deceased, Justus was still a Tech student when he applied for his first patent—a design for an electrical dynamic brake for a diesel loco­motive.

3 2 GEORGIA TECH • Summer 1990

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A Student's Notes From Soviet Georgia Written by David C. Nelson

3 4 GEORGIA TECH • Summer 1990

/,i

EDITOR'S NOTF.: David Nelson, a junior building construction major in the College of Architecture, was one of 250 Americans who participated in the Georgia, USA, to Georgia, USSR, Friendship Force exchange from April 18 through May 1. While the Americans were guests of families in the Soviet Georgia capital, Tbilisi, an equivalent number of Soviet Georgians were hosted in Atlanta.

Soviet Georgia—Sakartvelo— is situated between the Caspian and Black seas, and has a Mediterranean climate

not unlike Atlanta's. It's people have dark hair and dark complexions, and are proud of their independent heri­tage. They are not Russians, and quickly c< >rrect anyone making that common generalization.

The he >spitality of our hosts as­tounded every member of our del­egation, for two weeks, we were the central focus in their lives. They took me to see 16 cathedrals, the opera, museums, and on elaborate tours of Tbilisi and the surrounding area. If I admired anything in their home, they would offer it to me. If I picked up an item in a shop, they

would buy it for me. They show­ered me with gifts on a daily basis, some of them belonging to their families for generations.

My host family consisted of Mareb, an architect; Nina, a medical instructor; Sandro, an 18-year-old architectural student; and Irene, a four-year-old girl.

I visited the academy where Mareb is a professor and Sandro is a student. I also spoke with several of Sandro's friends, all of whom study at other colleges in the city. Most of them spoke a limited English vo­cabulary, so I was able to patch to­gether a reasonable idea of colle­giate life in Sakartvelo.

After completing 13 years of pri­mary education, including two years of English, students either enter the work force or apply for acceptance to a university. After passing an ex­hausting battery of examinations,

GEORGIA TECH • A Student's Georgian Experience 3 5

Although Polytechnic University offers courses similar to Tech, life for students is much different in Soviet Georgia.

they begin their first year of study. Tbilisi has several institutes of

higher learning, including the Poly­technic University and the Art Acad­emy, which I visited. The Polytech­nic University is large and its variety of technical studies is similar to those at Georgia Tech. The Art Academy is smaller and more selec­tive, emphasizing creativity and artis­tic ability. Its graduates become lead­ing artists and architects of Tbilisi.

The curriculum of both schools is inflexible and time-consuming. Stu­dents follow an exact schedule of classes until they graduate. English is a popular major with young women, but students of other disciplines must attend lessons given by private tutors to learn foreign languages. They take no physical education courses, but the men frequently par­ticipate in organized sport clubs.

Students attend lectures every day except Sunday, and arrive for their classes at 8 o'clock each morning. Many stay until after 5 p.m. At the Art Academy, the architectural stu­dents leave early, but only because there is no space for them to work at the college. They must continue their work at drafting tables in the corners of their homes.

Nearly all students live at home with their families, but there is a stu­dent village that houses students from different colleges. Many of the sport clubs practice at sports facilities located in this^ complex.

It is common to many young in Sakartvelo; I met many couples not yet in their twen­ties. If the couple are still

students, they usually continue to live with their parents until gradua­

tion. Get­ting a new home is diffi­cult and time-consuming, even if both members of the couple are employed.

Many of the students ap­proaching graduation expressed fears of unem­ployment or unsatisfactory employment. Knowing the best commis­sions would be going to established architects, the architectural students feared that their immediate future would be spent designing low bud­get, high-rise projects for the govern­ment. They felt confident in their training but knew that sub-standard construction materials and corrup­tion would be their future obstacles.

The artists were concerned with finding any job. Sakartvelo cherishes its creative talent, but it also has an abundance of talented artists. Since the government restricts the export of art and the local area is saturated with artists, it is difficult for them to find a niche. Many spoke of travel­ing west to Europe or America, but few wanted to leave their birthplace permanently.

Other students had similar appre­hensions. They worried about the

Tech and the Two Georgias

Linda Martinson, Tech vice president for plan­ning, budget and finance, was one of the 250 people participating in the Friendship Force exchange between Atlanta and Tbilisi, Georgia, U.S.S.R. (above left with her host family). During her visit, Martinson met with representatives of the Georgian Technological University, including the director of physics. There, she set the ground­work for a future joint venture between Georgia Tech and its Soviet Georgian counterpart.

competition for dwindling job op­portunities and lamented about the poor pay they would receive for their years spent studying. They were astounded when I told them the average starting salary for a Georgia Tech engineer was S32,000. When employed, they will make enough to feed and house them­selves, but their average pay will be around 400 rubles per month, a sum equivalent to $67.

My trip was the opportunity of a lifetime. I plan to return to Sakartvelo again, to see the many friends I made on my short trip to Soviet Georgia. And, with the changes rocking the Soviet Union, it may be possible for some (>f them to come to Georgia Tech to study. •

3 6 GEORGIA TECH • Summer 1990

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City planners envision new life for ghost towns.

"ou know the place—it's your rold hometown. The downtown

r streets are shaded with oak trees and lined with 19th century brick

buildings that have the name of the store etched in stone above

the door. It's where women shop, men hang out at the hardware store, and everyone gathers to watch the Christmas parade float by.

You see it in old movies all the time.

In real life, 50 years of thriving suburban residen­tial and commercial development have sucked the vitality out of many of America's central business districts— sometimes leaving behind only crumbling ghost towns.

In less fortunate communities, historic old down­town buildings are summarily boarded up or demolished to make room for highways and disparate civic projects.

But planners say there is hope for many of these older business districts.

"Now that most of the nation lives in newly designed areas, a lot of people are looking for new alternatives—looking for a sense of community," says R. Bruce MacGregor, a 1973 graduate of Georgia Tech's City Planning Department and director of planning for the Buckhead Coalition.

Continued page 43

4 0 GEORGIA TECH • Summer 1990

The search for "community sense of belong­ing—leads people to seek alternatives to crowded metro­politan areas, says city planner Bruce MacGregor. One result is an opportu nityfor new life in the old business districts of small towns.

GEORGIA TECH • Main Street Renewal 4 1

Older downtowns face stiff competition from subuAan maDs.

I;\

Business and political leaders are discover­ing that shopping malls can't speak to the history of a community, and they can't repli­cate the comfortable feeling of being around architecturally interesting buildings that have weathered the trials and triumphs of several

generations. "It's a sense of

place—a sense of hometown that you can't re-create in a mall," says Frank Mcintosh, a consultant with Georgia's Depart­ment of Commu­nity Affairs, Office of Rural Develop­ment.

There are now 27 Georgia cities restoring their downtown areas under the aus­pices of the Georgia Main-street Program—a Department of Community Affairs-admini­stered program that provides assistance to towns with populations

under 50,000 in revitalizing their downtowns. That number is up from the six that partici­

pated when the program was introduced as part of a federal Mainstreet Program pilot project in 1980. Nationally, the number of Mainstreet cities has risen to 550 from 30 back in 1980.

A successful downtown revitalization project can transform a moribund downtown, as in the case of Rome, Ga.

Back in 1980, the grass median that had

The "modern remake" of down­town Rome's old buildings "ivas a real shame," says architect Eugene Surber, "because you had a history of 100 years covered up with plywood, aluminum and plastic."

once divided Rome's main street—appropri­ately named Broad Street—had been paved over, leaving a vast asphalt gash; the sidewalks were cracked and weedy; and the historic Victorian buildings were crumbling.

"It was just plain ugly, to tell you the truth," says Eugene L. Surber, an Atlanta architect and 1964 graduate of Tech's College of Architecture who had gone to Rome as a member of a design team charged with finding ways to re-populate the district. "The buildings were great, but they had been covered up with plywood, aluminum and plastic. It was a real shame, because you had a history of 100 years of architecture—just there for you to enjoy."

Ten years later, Broad Street's generous green median is planted with oak trees and crepe myrtle, Victorian store fronts have been meticulously renovated, and the broad brick sidewalks are laced with landscaped green spaces. Clusters of shoppers wind their way down Broad Street, while less energetic types relax on shaded park benches and watch the world go by.

Not every town can do what Rome did. Since major depart­ment stores, chains and fran­chises are usually firmly planted in shopping malls, communities must have the economic power

to support both a mall and a downtown. "Typically, downtowns will attract small

businesses, but they can no longer anchor major department stores," explains MacGregor, the planner who was in charge of Georgia's original Main Street cities. "Downtowns can maintain high- and low-end businesses, but stores in the middle have gone to shopping centers."

And older downtowns face stiff competition from regional malls as well as local shopping centers.

"Two-thirds of Georgia's population can drive to an Atlanta mall and back in a day,"

Continued next page

GEORGIA TECH • Main Street Renewal 4 3

Revitalized downtowns focus on business and marketing as well as makeover beauty.

Revitalizing downtowns necessitates "sacrifices" by merchants, says Paul Pitts in front of the Floyd County Courthouse. • "You can't close for lunch and golf on Wednesdays."

says MacGregor. "The largest competition [to a revitalized downtown] is not so much local malls, but Atlanta's Lenox Square. The third largest shopping area in Fitzgerald, Ga.—200 miles from Atlanta—is Lenox."

Ironically, the primary rule of downtown revitalization dictates that a central business district look 19th century, but operate like a 20th-century mall.

"Who's putting us out of business?" asks Mcintosh. "It's the malls. So we have to find out what it is that they do differ­ently."

One major difference between malls and downtowns is that new malls are run by a full-time manager who oversees

the operation as a coherent entity. He groups compatible shops together, keeps stores open at roughly the same hours, and markets the whole complex.

Downtowns have limited control over their varied tenants, but they, too, can hire full-time managers who can struggle to unify their disparate businesses.

"You have to respond to the needs of the market," says Paul B. Pitts, director of the Rome Downtown Development Authority and director of PRIDE Unlimited, a private sector organization devoted to Rome's downtown revitalization. "Some sacrifices must be made for the common good. You can't close for

lunch and play golf on Wednesdays anymore." Many downtown revitalization projects have

stumbled and fallen by focusing exclusively on making their central business districts attractive again while ignoring business and marketing strategies.

"Many failures are the result of what I call TBL—trees, benches and lights," Mcintosh says. "They come up with a design solution that ignores everything else."

At the other end of the failure spectrum are the central business districts that try too hard to emulate shopping malls. They introduce metal awnings and strive to cover architectural eccentricities with plywood, forgetting that downtowns are supposed to look different from suburban malls.

hen it works, a revital­ized downtown can pull

both businesses and people back to the central

business district. Rome's 1980 vacancy rate of 25 per­

cent has been reduced to 15 percent since the community started its revitalization project, and Pitts expects vacancy rates to plummet and all ground-level space to be filled upon the 1992 completion of a new downtown complex that will house a civic center, a sports arena/audito­rium and a government building.

Last year, 50,000 people attended Rome's annual Christmas parade—a remarkable show­ing for a city with a population of around 30,000. Why the big turnout?

"It's cold. There's a nip in the air; the drum major's father was a drum major; there are trees and lights; the clock tower is lit up and all your landmarks are around you—and it's been going on for 60 years," says Pitts.

"Downtown has something the mall can't get its hands on. It's a special sense of place that is timeless." •

Lisa Crowe is an Atlanta-based writer.

4 4 GEORGIA TECH • Summer 1990

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RESEARCH

IfNotUS,Wood After investing $4.5 million to make biomass oil from wood scraps, the United States may be forced to sell the technology abroad, Dr. Daniel J. O'Neil warns.

As director of the Energy and Ma terials Sciences Laboratory at Geor­gia Tech, O'Neil encouraged the de­velopment of a patented biomass conversion process known as "en­trained flow pyrolysis."

Non-polluting and economi­cally practical, the process is be­lieved to be the world's most efficient biomass conversion system, yielding up to 60 per­cent oil on a dry basis (72 per­cent on a wet basis), from wood scraps and other agricultural refuse. Further, the process is simple and operates at relatively low temperatures. Earlier biomass tech­nology, also developed at Georgia Tech, produces roughly 30 percent oil.

And yet, O'Neil reports, U.S. man­ufacturers have expressed little inter­est in the technology, despite rising domestic oil prices which make the Georgia Tech process commercially attractive. Europeans are more highly motivated to perfect new en­ergy technologies since they pay about $42 per barrel for oil—twice the U.S. price, he notes. O'Neil says Georgia Tech has discussed a tech­nology transfer with several Euro­pean organizations in Belgium, Den­mark, Germany and Spain.

"This technology will probably be commercialized by a foreign entity," O'Neil says. "Five years from now, we'll probably end up buying U.S. technology back from a foreign-owned company. That's the irony."

Europe?

What makes the Georgia Tech process so efficient? In a conventional bio­mass conversion system, O'Neil ex­plains, wood scraps move slowly through a large, cross-sectional reac­tor, producing large quantities of charcoal. To harvest more oil and less charcoal, Tech researchers modified the process by pushing finely-ground wood particles rapidly through a high-temperature reactor.

Since the wood produces oil as a primary product and the oil has little time to degrade into gases or char­coal, O'Neil says, roughly 60 percent has been converted into biomass oil, which is suitable for use in industrial heaters, boilers, or kilns. The tech­nique also generates lesser quantities of valuable charcoal and low-BTU gas. In the future, O'Neil predicts the process will be improved to produce gasoline and specialty chemicals.

If half of the unused wood resi­dues produced annually in the U.S.

were converted in a Georgia Tech system operating at just 40 percent yield, O'Neil says, about 9<-i billion tons of biomass oil—the equivalent of 412 million barrels of crude petro­leum—could be produced.

Mending Broken Hearts

Anew tool for assessing leaky heart valves may

soon help doctors gauge prob­lems without diagnostic surgery,

says Dr. Ajit P. Yoganathan. co-direc­tor of the Bioengineering Center at Tech. Once perfected, the technique could bolster the battle against heart enlargement, certain types t >f high blood pressure and other disorders caused by leaky valves.

Used in conjunction with conven­tional ultrasound Doppler imaging, the new technique is believed to be the first quantitative, non-invasive method for measuring the volume of blood leaking from human or artifi­cial heart valves.

The Georgia Tech method em­ploys a mathematical formula and basic engineering principles to calcu­late the volume of leakage.

Yoganathan's unique blood-flow duplicator, a system of mechanical valves and pumps representing a human heart, has provided prelimi­nary information to validate the for­mula. In both steady-state and pul-sating-flow models, Yoganathan says, mathematical/Doppler predic­tions corresponded well with vol­ume measurements of simulated blood flow.

Ongoing research is addressing more complicated leaks, which may

Continued page 49

4 6 GEORGIA TECH • Summer 90

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RESEARCH Continued from page 46

encounter physical obstructions that alter flow patterns.

Chaos in Chemical Reactions Chemists may have to find new ways of describing certain non-linear chemical reactions, thanks to the new science of chaos.

Developed over the past 20 years, chaos is the study of non-linear phe­nomena that share common charac­teristics, such as randomness.

Dr. Ronald F. Fox, a physicist and chaos researcher at Tech, believes that chaos may exist in certain chemical reactions.

In most chemical reactions, the component materials eventually seem to assume an equilibrium state at which no further reactions take place. However, sensitive light-scat­tering instruments still detect signifi­cant molecular activity. Though such activity is < >f no importance in most cases, those tiny perturbations can be magnified into large fluctuations if the system becomes chaotic.

"When you have a chaotic sys­tem, the fluctuations that are nor­mally very small become very large," Fox explains. "There is extreme sen­sitivity to the initial conditions, and that sensitivity shows itself in the growth of the fluctuations." •

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GEORGIA TECH • Research 4 9

pROEttE

TheManToo Busy to Hate Written by Charles Hyatt

Ivan Allen Jr. was born in 1911 in a house on Atlanta's fashion­able West Peachtree Street, de­

livered by a black midwife because the white doctor did not arrive in time. The delivery was to have a dramatic impact later when, as mayor of Atlanta in the 1960s, Allen led the city through a period of ra­cial adjustment.

As Atlanta's mayor, Allen was debating whether to cross racial boundaries by attending a bjack Community Chest fund-raiser. He decided to go, and the atmosphere was tense. Suddenly, to his surprise, a black woman wrapped her arms about him in a huge hug and cried, "This is my baby!" Allen was being embraced by a woman he hadn't seen in years—the midwife who had delivered him. The tension van­ished and Allen knew he had made

the right decision for himself and for Atlanta.

Allen's plan for Atlanta's eco­nomic growth and cultural develop­ment helped spur one of the nation's great success stories. Under his leadership, Atlanta's civil rights movement was successful—while other Southern cities exploded with racial tension—helping Atlanta earn the sobriquet: "the city too busy to hate."

His father, Ivan Allen Sr., was an office machinery salesman who founded the Ivan Allen-Marshall Co., Atlanta's landmark office furni­ture chain. Allen Sr. was a Georgia state senator in the 1920s and ac­tive in the Rotary Club, the Cham­ber of Commerce and the Boy Scouts.

Allen followed his father's foot­steps in the family business and is

The Allen File 1942-45: U.S. Army, Fourth Service Command. 1953: Elected president of the Alumni Association for one-year term. 1958: Receives Distinguished Service Award. 1961: Defeats Lester Maddox in mayoral primary. 1962: Inaugurated mayor of Atlanta. 1962: Eliminates restrictions on duties of black policemen. 1963: At the request of President Kennedy, testifies before Congress in support of Civil Rights Act.

1963: Appoints bi-racial commission to examine racial situation in Atlanta and recommend action.

1963: Atlanta swimming pools and parks desegregated. 1964: Convinces 14 downtown hotels to desegregate. 1965: Re-elected to second tenn as mayor. 1966: Tours riot-torn Summerhill community in effort to restore calm. 1966: Creates Community Relations Commission. 1966: Braves and Falcons move to Atlanta and new stadium. 1985: Receives Exceptional Achievement Award

chairman of the Ivan Allen Co. He married Louise Richardson of At­lanta in 1936. Their son. Ivan Allen III, currently directs the firm.

"My father always said to get in­volved in civic affairs, and so I did," says Allen, whose days at Tech were early indicators of his political talents. President of the student council and the SAE fraternity, he was also elected to membership in the honorary fraternities Phi Kappa Phi, ANAK, Omicron Delta Kappa, Theta Nu Epsilon and Beta Gamma Sigma. He played on the freshman basketball team and graduated among the top five in his class.

Allen remained active with Geor­gia Tech and later became presi­dent of the Georgia Tech Alumni Association. He has received both the Georgia Tech Alumni Distin­guished Service Award and the Ex­ceptional Achievement Award.

On the shelves of his downtown office, the 79-year-old Allen has several

scrapbooks filled with news clip­pings which document some of the highlights of his political life. They go back to his college days.

"I was in the old School of Com­merce when the Board of Regents decided to move it to the I niversity of Georgia back in the '30s, and we had 450 students marching in pro­test!" recalls Allen, who graduated with a commerce degree in 1933-"It caused quite a stir back then."

A scrapbook is open to the front-page photo of the event from an old Atlanta Georgian. "That was only the beginning of student pro­tests," he adds.

5 0 GEORGIA TECH • Summer 90

MARGARET HAHRTH PHOIO

Tech a lumnus Ivan Allen: As Atlanta mayor, h e sought peaceful, constructive change in turbulent t imes .

Allen partially credits good preparation in commerce and busi­ness administration at Tech for his later success in business and poli­tics. "Georgia Tech has had a tre­mendous impact on the city of At­lanta and on the whole economy of the South." he says. "I can remem­ber staying close to Tech alumni for years, and not just the people from my class of '33, but from other years. The rapid technological change we've seen over the last 30 years and the explosive growth of jobs in Atlanta have been beyond any of our wildest dreams. They were heavily influenced by Georgia Tech graduates on all levels."

As mayor of Atlanta from 1962-70, Allen spearheaded major change in the city and was forced to respond to other changes be­yond his control. As president of the Atlanta Chamber of Commerce, he wrote a "six-point plan" for de­velopment of the city including ur­ban renewal, schools, moderniza­

tion of transportation facilities, the construction of a public transit sys­tem, the building of an auditorium and a coliseum, and a "Forward At­lanta" campaign aimed at promot­ing the city to the rest of the coun­try.

It was Allen's diplomacy in get­ting city business leaders to talk to black students staging sit-ins at Rich's that led to his city-wide popularity and election as mayor. His active dialogues with the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. kept Atlanta together during those tumultuous times, and his good business ap­proach to improving race relations unified opposing extremes where others had failed.

J ^ i l e n helped make Atlanta a X-«m major league city with the

J L «BRL, arrival of the Atlanta Braves, and he was instrumental in promoting the development of the MARTA system, the growth of Hartsfield Airport, and the rebuild­

ing of the Atlanta arts community after the tragic Air France accident that killed 106 of the city's cultural leaders overseas.

Allen's name has become a per­manent part of Georgia Tech in the newly formed Ivan Allen College of Management, Policy and Interna­tional Affairs. "I'm very honored to have the n e w college named for me," says Allen. "It's building to­ward the future and has lots of po­tential.

"Atlanta has been very lucky to have Georgia Tech located right here," Allen adds.

"Her alumni have in may ways dominated the business community here, and the city and the institute really have grown u p together. My generation helped to b u m p Atlanta up to a new level of growth, and I guess yours will see her into the future." •

Charles Hyatt is a graduate student at Georgia Tech.

GEORGIA TECH • Profile: Allen 51

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