07/03/2003
Another Farewell
When I was doing graduate work at the University of Pittsburgh another graduate student was Donald Koontz. Don’s wife Emma was a nurse at Magee Hospital, where she met Vicki, who was working on her B.S. degree in nursing education at Pitt. Vicki was having trouble with chemistry and Don suggested that I tutor her. Don was a take-charge kind of guy and loved to organize picnics and other outings that also served to bring the nurse and her tutor together in social settings. I was a flop as a tutor but did manage to convince Vicki to marry me. We were married in Cleveland, where I worked at NACA (now NASA) and she worked at Crile Veterans Hospital.
After a brief stint teaching at a university in Illinois, Don moved to Bell Labs. He was the one who invited me for an interview, which resulted in a job offer and a career at Bell Labs of over 36 years. During that time, Don and Emma were our best friends and we ended up living only a few blocks from each other. Don became a department head at Bell Labs and, when the title of Distinguished Member of Technical Staff was created, he successfully nominated me to be among the first to receive that honor. You can see that he played seminal roles in both my personal and professional lives. Emma passed away in 1990 and last week Don joined her.
As with many of my former colleagues at Bell Labs, Don also played a role in your life, albeit indirectly. For example, you probably take for granted the reports via satellite from all over the world on the evening news programs. The first active communications satellite was Telstar, born at Bell Labs and launched in 1962. Don and his group were involved in qualifying and testing the rechargeable nickel-cadmium battery flown on Telstar. This battery was charged in orbit by some 3600 solar cells, invented at Bell Labs in the 1950s. Telstar followed the launching in 1960 of the passive satellite Echo, which was just a large plastic balloon.
Whereas Echo served only to reflect and relay signals, Telstar had the smarts to process, amplify and re-transmit signals. It was a huge success, as hundreds of millions of people all over the world saw it transmit the first transatlantic TV signals. Telstar prompted musical compositions by rock and pop groups and even Duke Ellington. Although it only was in service for a year, Telstar paved the way for the multitude of commercial and military communications satellites that are orbiting or have orbited our planet. Today, most of us have gotten used to the time delay between question and answer that is a characteristic of satellite communication.
The nickel-cadmium battery in Telstar did its job in orbit. But Don played a role in another area of power that plays a more down to earth role in your lives. When your electrical power goes out, you may reach for the phone to call neighbors to see if they’re experiencing the same outage or to call the power company to report the outage. If that power outage also hit your phone company, your phone is working thanks to lead-acid batteries that back up the power to the phone system until generators can be brought on line. Chances are good that these batteries are what we knew as “round cells”.
Don and his very capable colleagues at Bell Labs invented the round cell in response to problems with the conventional lead- acid batteries of the time. Fires in remote locations in the old Bell System were traced to acid leaking from cracked batteries. The round cells were designed to avoid such problems and also to provide a significantly longer life in service than the earlier batteries. A major effort was launched to develop the round cell batteries, which were first installed in the Bell System about 30 years ago. These batteries are still being manufactured and some have logged three decades in service ensuring your capability to call home.
Electroplating is another area in which Don played a significant role. If you’ve ever looked at the innards of a telephone, computer or any electronic device you will have seen the printed circuit boards upon which are mounted the transistors and other electrical components. The many gold-plated connectors and paths that serve as wires connecting the different devices may have impressed you. Western Electric, the manufacturing arm of the old Bell System, made the devices and circuit boards for the phone system. The plating operations were being done the old- fashioned way, hand carrying the boards to different plating baths to accomplish that phase of the operation.
Don played a key role in convincing Western that they should automate all the plating operations in one machine and that they should pay for its development. Don’s department undertook the job of making such a machine. Four of them were constructed at Bell Labs and then delivered to Western Electric plants in Dallas, Kansas City and Omaha. The machines combine electroplating and electropolishing operations and both gold- and nickel- plating. You may have printed circuit boards in your home that were plated using these very machines, especially if you’re of the generations that still have phones with cords and can remember that there once was a Bell System.
I would be remiss if I didn’t mention Don’s passion for making fine furniture, of which we have several examples in our home. He spent most of his evenings in his basement workshop turning out works of utility and beauty. Before our town went the recycling way where you dump everything into a hole, we had a real dump. Don would spend weekends picking up discarded furniture and restoring it to its original condition, or better.
I will close with an example of either Don’s keen sense of observation or his utter recklessness – I’ve never figured out which. When we were students, we were invited out to the home of one of our professors, who lived in a suburb of Pittsburgh, possibly Mt. Lebanon. Don suggested that a few of us students go for a hike and explore the area. We came to a railroad bridge crossing over a highway. There were two tracks. Don started to walk across the bridge on one of the tracks.
Like utter idiots, we followed. I said he was a leader. Sure enough, we’re on the bridge and a train comes barreling towards us! Thankfully for all of us, the train was on the other track! While the rest of us were terrified, Don maintained his cool and stated that he knew any trains would be on the other track. Why? Our track was rusty, while the other track was shiny. Obviously, both would have been shiny if trains ran on both of them. Over 50 years later, I still shudder when I think of the experience and wonder if Don’s bit of logic stood on firm ground.
Whatever the answer, I’m forever grateful that Don picked the rusty track. Thank you, Don!
Allen F. Bortrum
|