Simon Ramo - the 'R' in TRW - dead at 103

[gary]

Simon Ramo, who was the 'R' in TRW Inc, passed away last month on
27 July 2016 aged 103.

Graduating from Caltech at 23 with Ph.D's in both physics and electrical
engineering, shortly thereafter he became the director or research at
General Electric where he helped develop the electron microscope.

Before the age of 30, he had logged 25 patents.

He led a busy life. After the end of World War II, he moved to Hughes Aircraft
to start a division working on military electronics.

When the Defence Department grew wary of awarding sensitive military
contracts to the eccentric Howard Hughes, Ramo teamed with a Caltech
classmate, Dean Everett Wooldridge, to form their own company.

Woodridge would become the 'W' in TRW.

Having gained a reputation in the Pentagon as being the two leading
figures in the new field of electronic warfare and guidance systems,
Eisenhower bypassed large corporations and approached them to
develop the ICBM.

With the Cold War in full swing, Eisenhower saw the ICBM as America's
highest national priority. They needed to develop a rocket that could deliver
a nuclear warhead 6,000 miles away.

Eisenhower told them "keep it a secret. Let's not tell Congress about it".

Ramo and Woodridge moved their office from a former barbershop
to a Catholic church in the suburbs of LA. They pulled out the pews and
the urinals in the bathrooms to make sufficient room.

The two merged with a financial backer, Thompson Products, who became
the 'T' in TRW.

The ICBM project brought about the Atlas rocket which eventually served
as the launch vehicle for the orbital Project Mercury spaceflights, including
the one used to launch John Glenn.

By the time it was acquired by Grumman in 2002 for US$7.8 billion,
TRW had grown to 122,258 workers and had reached #57 in the Forbes
500 list.

In 1962, Ramo established the 100-acre Redondo Beach Space Park in
California which was awarded the first NASA spacecraft contract.

TRW designed and built the Pioneer 1, 10 and 11 spacecraft.
It designed and built the HEAO 2 Einstein X-ray observatory, the
Compton Gamma Ray Observatory and the Chandra X-ray Observatory.

It designed and built the descent engine for the Apollo lunar lander.

It designed and built the 23 Defense Support Program (DSP) satellites
which are used to detect the infrared signature of a missile launch.

It was a prime contractor in maintaining the US ICBM rocket arsenal.

Ramo was awarded the National Medal of Science and received his
last patent at age 100.

His wrote a textbook entitled “Fields and Waves in Communication Electronics”
which has sold more than one million copies and is used in more than
100 colleges and universities.



Obituary LA Times -
http://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-simon-ramo-20160628-snap-story.html

TRW Inc Wikipedia -
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TRW_Inc.

[clive milne]

The idea of an otherwise ethical (but naive) scientist handing greed driven psychopaths the means to incinerate a city of a couple of million innocent civilians by remote control... for profit.

Seriously, what's there, not to like?

Wooo!

[Dennis]

Sad news, may he rest in peace and thanks for the history Gary.

I recall that the MAROTS satellite program that I worked on in the 1970’s used some specialised high power TRW transistors in T03 metal cans; TRW 223 was their designation I think, in the TO-3 metal can.

Cheers

Dennis

[gary]

Hi Dennis,

That's really interesting! You must tell us more.

I know TRW did have a semiconductor division and were one of the first
to commercialize the transistor. They produced a succession of high-power,
high-frequency transistors for the aerospace industry over the decades.

TTL (Transistor-Transistor Logic) was also invented at TRW in 1961 which
was seminal to the integrated circuit industry and the widespread adoption
of digital electronics.

The TRW Space Park at Redondo Beach, now owned by Northrop Grumman,
was declared an historic aerospace site in 2011 and plays a key part
in the Californian space industry.

The final assembly and test of the James Webb Space Telescope takes place
at the Space Park before it is transported to French Guiana for launch.

[strongmanmike]

I would expect he is one of your idols Gary?...side by side with the smartest person in the room...not ;)

As usual, a great bit of info to read :thumbsup:

Mike

[Dennis]

Hi Gary

Back in the 70’s the component Quality movement was somewhat in its infancy and the accepted practice was to design and manufacture the devices “as best you were able to” and then test them at the end of the process to establish an “Acceptable Quality Level” or AQL according to various US Standards.

Those production runs with a superior AQL were diverted to the aerospace industry and those with a lesser AQL fed into the industrial or commercial streams at much more competitive pricing.

When we purchased the higher level AQL components, we still had to Qualify them by taking a sample from the batch then run a series of non-destructive and destructive tests to assess if there were any potential rogues in that batch. These rogues usually failed very early on in the testing, following the classical bathtub curve.

We also had a smaller sample of the components from the batch, operating to their full specification in a series of Verification Of Quality (VOQ) tests in the laboratory, to establish their performance over a longer period of time.

Then, the Japanese semiconductor industry with its TQM approach began to make inroads into the aerospace programmes. One anecdotal story is that an aerospace company placed a purchase order for some electrical components with a specified AQL of x% and when they received the goods from Japan, they also found a memo saying that here are the 100 good ones you ordered are here are the x% bad ones, although we are not sure why you would want the bad ones!:)

This was the first time I came across the concepts of TQM to manage, assure and control the end-to-end organisational processes rather than just manufacturing products and then testing and measuring them at the end to categorise and/or pass/fail them.

These were the days of discrete components; IC’s hadn’t found their way into the design process. There were no plastic packages, only ceramic or metal cans with glass/metal seals for the conductors which had to be tested to ensure there was no outgassing due to cracks in the seals.

We also ran Particle Impact Noise Detection tests to see if any of the EBC connections might become loose (chatter) under launch vibration levels, or if there was any loose debris inside the cans that would then float in zero-g and possibly short out the component.

We still had a typing pool and 10:00am and 3:00pm tea trolley back in those days.:)

Cheers

Dennis