Aaus newsletter winter 2017

ALUMNI ASSOCIATION OF UNIVERSITY SCHOOL WINTER 2017 NEWSLETTER MEMBERSHIP

If your label says 16 then please renew, since that membership expired in Dec. 2016. If you are renewing, please send your dues to AAUS, 587 Fox Lane, Worthington, OH 43085; $15 for snail mail, $10 for e-mail. For those of you on the e-mail list, please e-mail me for your current status if you have questions.

Our membership drive is going exceedingly well. So far we have had 32 yearly renewals, 9 Life, and 6 new yearly memberships. Thank you all for your support and welcome new members!

From your responses, I learned that several of you thought you had renewed last year. It became clear that two things had occurred: I made some mistakes recording the renewals, for which I deeply apologize, and secondly my worst fears realized were realized. We had extremely poor mail delivery for about the last 3 months of 2015 and the first 5 months of 2016 with either receiving no mail at all or other folks’ mail. After about 8 months of “explaining” the problem to the USPS (several times and to several different people), it was finally straightened out.

So now, please help both me and the USPS stay correct. Please check your membership designation on your return address labels making sure it agrees with your records. After your name will be either a number and letters or a letter and number. Exs: 17-54 means you are a current member and are affiliated with the class of 54; 17fac means current and a faculty member and a few will have 18, 19,20 since some of you pay for a couple of years at a time. Life members have L56 meaning a life member from the class of 56, etc.

FAREWELLS Unfortunately, every newsletter we have farewells to publish. We have learned of several more since our last newsletter.

We extend our sympathies to all the family and friends of the following, ever growing list of friends now gone. *Emma McCaughey Koehler, ‘36 *Robert C. Gump, ‘42 *Ann Bennett Hamilton, ‘46 *Lou Gilchrist Kuempel, ‘47 *Rebecca Tewell Mills, ’66 sister of John Tewell, ‘66

A SQUARE PEG IN A ROUND HOLE The following story by Bob Butche, ’54 is the final installment of a very complicated student and man. Every school except University School expelled him. Those of you who were classmates or in nearby classes may well remember him, but this is the rest of the story…

1

Super Doc;

missile launcher system. When the test began, everything seemed to be working perfectly. The radar system locked on the incoming target and the computer spat out the exact heading and elevation to launch the missile. Then, when the test engineer pressed the LAUNCH button, all Hell broke loose. There was a giant thunk when the electro-magnets were energized. Then a waft of smoke was wafted up from below the servo. After several seconds of retching and humming, flames broke out. In the melee, DoD brass began to race to the exits. At that instant the massive power consumption overheating the electromagnets pulled down the electrical system plunging the test facility into utter darkness. Rumors back at headquarters suggested that the costly and heavy mechanisms failed to operate before shorting out and melting down. One witness told Kiefer the damned things smoked horribly, caught fire and, generally scared the shit out of everyone. All twelve of the first production run were believed to be defective. But why? How could that be? The official report said only that during the test, four immense servocontrolled electro-magnets were ‘damaged during slewing certification.’ Something was horribly wrong. The second conference call resulted in an immediate review of the engineering and manufacturing processes. The outcome of the engendering review was that Raytheon’s electro-magnetic fast-slewing actuators were competent in design and absent manufacturing flaws. And why not?

For the world’s experts in servo systems all worked at Raytheon. The only people who understood the technology were the one’s who designed and built it. Back at Boston, Raytheon engineering managers sought to find someone, anyone really, with credentials in analog servo systems. Such a person could review the design and identify the problem. There were only two such people. One of them, Kiefer Newman,

The Kiefer Newman Story Super Doc: The Man Who Saved Raytheon’s Patriot Missile Defense System Part III - About That Call From Dallas To everyone’s relief, DoD approved building a prototype Patriot anti-missile system to prove the component systems: Radar, Intercept Computer, mechanical aiming system, and target-seeking missile.

A few years later, when events in the middle east threatened to turn ugly, missile defense became an important need for all service branches. From that point on, the hardware and software components of what would one day become the Patriot Missile Defense System, were deemed sufficiently important to warrant a full-scale development contract. Over nearly two years the early designs were up updated and prototypes produced. This is crunch time in the defense industry – the time when theory, money, mission and practice are melded into hardware. Suddenly, he said, Raytheon suffered a horrible reversal.

After ten years work on what was intended to become the Patriot missile defense system, Raytheon’s Patriot Defense development project faltered.

Unseen, and unknown to Kiefer, the heart of the launch systems, the fast aiming mechanisms, malfunctioned so bad the test facility was set afire. The first conference call was to delay the prototype demonstration at Raytheon’s massive Dallas division. More than once. By then, well behind schedule, the full-scale prototype test was nervously scheduled.

Legend has it that some military brass arrived to see the first test of Raytheon’s super-secret target-acquisition and anti-

2

a PhD in electrical engineering specializing in magnetic actuators, was not on the list.

Not only was he already at Raytheon, he was in the communications group. Send Kiefer to Dallas? Not unless someone added his name to the short list of outside experts. Kiefer’s supervisor offered his name. “Kiefer Newman,” he said, “was someone they ought to send to Dallas. The questions were many: Did he have DoD clearance? Was he from an accredited school? Were his professional bona-fides checked out? In little more than an hour, management found the expert they needed – two floors below. By then, a hand-written note arrived at Human relations. Some chap by the name of Newman – from the wilds of Ohio – was to be sent to the Dallas facility. That night Kiefer Newman packed for the trip, drove to Logan Airport to take American Airline’s dinner flight to Dallas. His assignment was to examine the missile launch positioning subsystem and report his findings to the program managers at Boston. The flight to Dallas was bumpy and delayed. Kiefer arrived at Love field late near midnight. He asked the chap who picked him up at Love Field to be driven to Raytheon’s test facility so that he might examine the melted servo launchers. “Oh, and ask someone with the keys to be there to turn on the equipment so I can see the equipment and read the manuals?” “First thing in the morning alright?” the chap asked. “Right now – I plan to be there all night When they arrived at the test facility there was a supervisor and two guards waiting. Then Kiefer turned on all the switches and looked at the damaged electromagnet. “Sure enough,” he said, “Its burnt to a crisp. Too much current. Too much heat – everything go bang!” Before long, Kiefer thought he had a clue. Not sufficiently documented for him to claim knowledge of why the failures occurred, but more than enough to see shortcomings in the work of those who clearly seemed to

have a less clear understanding of electromagnetics. “Your guys really melted these f***ers,” he told the somnambulant minders that night. Then he spread the schematics and assembly documents all over the test lab floor. For several hours he walked about among the machines and documents. Then he spotted a current limiting resister in the servo power amplifier. “This looks like the problem,” he explained to people who had no foundation to understand. “Oh, yes – this is wrong, he said, marking a symbol on one of the schematics in red. In what had the feel of a Gotcha moment, he assured the minders and guards “These guys don’t know crap. When the electromotive force cancels the slewing current adding more makes things worse . . .” Standing all but knee deep in charts, files, diagrams graphs and tables of test results, Kiefer held up the servo power driver system schematic.

“I found it!” he said, triumphantly. “You guys can go home.” He remembered telling his minder, who was long past being cogent in the predawn darkness, “It’s the current limiting resistor in the servo power emitter. Its a thousand ohms where two thousand ohms would make the system more stable.” By the time he arrived at his motel it was morning. After a couple hours of sleep he returned to the test facility.

After being introduced to the men whose work he found faulty, Kiefer told the project manager, “I need to run a test on one of these units. I may burn up another of these electromagnets, but only one.

Once I test my theory, I’ll know the answer to your problem.” You’re going to destroy a quarter-million dollar servo just to see if you’re right?” The project manager asked.

“Of course not,” Kiefer assured him. “I know I’m right. I just want to see the smoke and flames!”

Smoke Test

3

By noon, the offending resistor had been replaced in one of the servo drives. Kiefer inserted a square wave generator in the on - off power circuit so he could interrupt operations – just in case. Then the technicians, and a dozen or more mystified, quality engineering school graduates, pitched in to help out in the testing. “Okay – I’m ready – fire her up!”

Kiefer told a roomful of assistants. When the most senior engineer nodded his consent, the 440 volt charging apparatus began to buzz and whertle. In what Kiefer thought as little as one millisecond the drive current exceeded its maximum design limit – by a factor of ten. “No wonder the servo mechanisms were melting!” he hollered. “Kill it – all of it,” Kiefer said. “Now let me see what went wrong.” Long after everyone else had left for the weekend, Kiefer was able to confirm the mechanism of failure. Knowing what was wrong was good, but no one, not even the strange man sent down from Boston, knew why. On paper, and in theory, everything was perfect. The mechanism was too much slewing current.

And everyone knew that much before he flew to Dallas. Why didn’t the goddamn thing work? Kiefer wanted to know. And how was it so many electrical engineers failed to see the problem? He would not go home that weekend. He had no family to visit, or important plans. He’d stay at the test facility as long as it took. For the next two days, Kiefer and the test bed technicians worked the problem, ran tests and found neither an identifiable trigger nor clear evidence of its cause or solution.

For some it was baffling. For Kiefer Newman it was totally unacceptable.

Electro magnets were one of the oldest electrical devices known to man. But what he did not know that weekend was that he was he faced by a problem solvable only by application of the laws of physics.

Theory against practice. His speciality.

“Theory is always right,” Melvin Newman

had taught him as a child. All one has to do to solve any scientific or engineering problem is identify the point or time where practice failed to comply with theory.

What could be easier? After two days of Diet Cokes, Wendy’s burgers and fries, long hours, with little or no sleep, Kiefer Newman faced a devastating reality: He was not closer to a solution than the day he foolishly claimed a drive amplifier bias resistor was certain to be the problem.

Sunday night he left the Dallas test facility for his motel room near Love field.

Moments after falling face-forward on the bed, Kiefer slept so deeply he never once thought about the servo melting dilemma.

He slept twelve hours in all. On Monday morning DoD notified Raytheon to suspend all work on the anti-missile defense system pending engineering review. Once he was awake, Kiefer examined the engineering specifications.

Then, line by line, he compared the intended functions to the systems under test. After a few hours a familiar word passed through his mind – Hysteresis – a property of electromagnets that considered more than the standard metrics of source current, voltage, frequency and slewing rate. Unlike all the other metrics, hysteresis was time dependent.

Somewhere in Raytheon’s huge electromagnets there was an unaccounted for dynamic lag between input and output.

Kiefer knew that the hysteresis effect disappears as the input changes more slowly. Raytheon’s design of the servo slewing amplifiers was intended to change the position of the servo as fast as possible – not allowing for the internal hysteresis field to diminish. He’d solved the problem.

Now it was time to return to Boston.

When Kiefer arrived at the test site well past quitting time on Monday evening he was locked out. Absent access to any of the working devices, his only course of action was to replicate the electromagnetic servo to a solvable

4

equation. Power input on one side, and mechanical slewing on the other. “I wasn’t finished reducing the schematic functions into a quadrilateral equation when I first understood the nature of the problem,” he explained. “ I explained this to Louis Armstrong the night we were listening to his old tapes . . .” “You’ve told me this before . . . “ I complained. “Louis didn’t understand it – nor did my dad when I made him buy a hysteresis synchronous turntable to get rid of the wow when playing his LPs. Besides, Who else can I tell this too,” he grumbled. “Not even the senior electro-magnet system designers saw this error. You’re the only other person I know who ever heard of hysteresis.” So the outcome was a defective motor rotor – hysteresis lockup?“ ”Yes – the hysteresis loop held the damn thing stationary no matter how much power was delivered.” “And,” I asserted, “hysteresis loop effects are largely invisible in the real world . . . a Fourier function.” “No, but Fourier analysis was certain to reveal the dichotomy.” “Is that how you located the problem?” I asked. “No I kept looking for something obvious – every engineer’s nightmare.” By the next morning, Newman’s site privileges were suspended on account of the project being put on hold at DoD. Certain he knew both cause and how to fix it, Kiefer left a note on the test site door. Then, he headed back to Boston. He was satisfied that the problem was solved. And tired to the bone. He mostly slept on the way home. The sort of deep sleep that comes with a powerful sense of accomplishment. When he deplaned at Logan Airport, he was met at the gate by one of Raytheon’s executive aircraft pilots. “I’m to fly you back to Dallas for some sort of meeting,” the welldressed young man explained. Had it not been that Kiefer had never once traveled in a corporate jet, he might have declined the invitation to return. But, riding on one

of the company aircraft was an important perk. Once the aircraft reached cruising altitude, Kiefer unbuckled his seat belt to push open the cockpit door. “Bob Butche’s got a plane like this and he lets me ride up front.” It was true I owned several similar aircraft, but none of them were jets – and damned sure not Grumman Gulfstream models. “Passengers are not permitted up front on Raytheon aircraft,” the pilot explained, no doubt wondering who this strange man was or why he was so important. After an hour or so listening to a 14 year old genius chortling on about his desire to ride up front, someone let him sit briefly in the co-pilot seat. That’s where he liked to ride whenever we flew together.

He marveled at the instrument panel, and the chatter on the radios. Before long he instructed the pilots on how they ought to redesign their radio receivers for clearer sound. You could equalize the audio to accentuate the consonants,” he assured them. “We’re not allowed to talk to engineering people,” the pilot said. “What kind of a rule is that?” Kiefer demanded.

“Who makes up all these stupid rules By Kiefer’s account he was still in the right seat when the aircraft landed at Love field.

That night, absent sleep, and having made a round trip to and from Boston, Kiefer Newman, PhD finally lay down his head at the same motel. When Kiefer and those who worked under his supervision arrived at the test facility the next morning, he was formally introduced to the engineers and technical crew – a courtesy earlier overlooked. He liked that, but then came a major surprise – recognition. Something he’d sought, but never fully received since that first day at the University of Pennsylvania. “So you’re that Super Doc everyone is talking about,” one of the design engineers hollered out. Super Doc, it turned out, was a Raytheon honorarium for people with doctoral degrees who could solve problems others could only talk about. You can call me Kief, if you

5

learned a huge technological base of my own understanding of these things from Kiefer. Much of which is still with me today, brought along over the years from those basement hours. A genius is often misunderstood, not accepted by their peers as Einstein was on occasion during his life.

like,” Kiefer replied, innocent of the honor being bestowed on him by his own peers.

He had lunch with the big shots at Dallas that day – and spoke with the DoD people.

It was, in nearly every way, the best goddamn day of his life. When Kiefer returned to Boston, people who once ignored him began to call him Super Doc – even the janitorial staff. When he retired, Kiefer Newman, Super Doc, was given a suitable send-off – for what earned him the most respected of all honors at Raytheon. Kiefer Newman could solve Fourier equations in his head. Doing so gave him the unique power to solve a realworld problems by mathematical modeling. For that’s what Kiefer Newman did that night in his Dallas motel room before writing the hysteresis equations on Holiday Inn stationery before pinning it on the test lab door. Equations that made of him a legend. If only his father Melvin Newman had lived to know of his son’s immense service to the nation he so loved.

To me Kiefer was just ”Unusual Kiefer” and I liked him.

Remember Annual Meeting June 24, 2017, Ramseyer Hall, 12-4. Recognizing the 50th Anniversary of the closing of University School.

I have heard from several folks representing many different classes and they are planning on mini-class reunions.

Great to hear! We would like to have as many of us as possible celebrate this special occasion. If you want to put anything in the Spring newsletter regarding any class plans you are working on please let us know. Save the date!

The Patriot Missile Defense System went into service world-wide in 1984. Today it remains America’s most popular and reliable anti-missile defense system.

We need to hear from you!!!

COMMENTS We received this e-mail from Richard Batchelor, ‘53

There is still very much to learn from and about each other. PLEASE do continue to send us more of your memories of University School and stories of the achievements and interesting lives of those who were part of the University School experience.

We look forward to hearing more about each other’s lives, during school and after.

Please send your stories or comments to jswhaueisen@yahoo.com or snail mail to AAUS, 587 Fox Lane, Worthington,

I read with great interest the Kiefer Newman story. I was a year ahead of Kiefer at University School and I considered him a good friend, yes sometimes difficult but that didn’t matter to me. It might have been because I could be “difficult” at times too.

Kiefer and I had similar interests, electronics and mechanical things.

I recall many hours spent in his basement working on whatever “invention” he was working on. His deep understanding of all things in these fields amazed me and I

6