Cover
Foreword
Era 1
Introduction
Governance
Membership
Finance
Administration
Awards
Symposia
Publications
Education
Courses
Standards/Practices
Divisions
Sections/Chapters
Interactions
History
Era 2
Era 3
Era 4
Era 5
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60 Years of the AVS (1953-2013)
Era 1: Section 1
1953-1967: The
Formative Era
Introduction: Setting the Scene
Why was
a society dealing
with vacuum formed in the first place? Clearly to address a need, but why
was there a need? During World War II, there had been many developments
of technology which depended on the application of reduced pressure, or
vacuum. The Berkeley cyclotron required high vacuum and separation of
the isotopes of uranium for the atomic bomb had required large numbers
of vapor diffusion pumps at Oak Ridge, and large volumes of new optical
coatings were required for gun sights. The science involved in these
developments could be discussed at meetings of the existing physical or
chemical societies but the methods used to provide the required pressure
environments for these processes were not considered. So there was
clearly a need for a forum for the discussion of vacuum equipment, its
performance and related topics.
A number of meetings on topics involving vacuum and thin
films had been held prior to 1953. A “Conference on the Application of
Metallic Fluoride Reflection Reducing Films to Optical Elements” was
organized by the Optical Instrument Committee for the US Army; it was
held in Brooklyn. N.Y. in October, 1943 with more than 130 attendees. As
recorded in the report of the meeting, Colonel Welch of Frankford
Arsenal stated “we have brought together people who build and use all
known types of apparatus for producing the preferred type of film. We
hope to bring out and lay on the table all the troubles and difficulties
and to bring to their attention any system, as well as all the things
that any of you have found”. He noted that the Army had the capacity to
coat 600,000 sq. inches of surface per 8-hr day but that pump-down time
was the rate limiting step in manufacturing.
In October 1947, a “High Vacuum Symposium” was held in
Cambridge, MA, under the sponsorship of the Division of Industrial and
Engineering Chemistry of the American Chemical Society, to discuss
vacuum engineering and vacuum metallurgy. It was chaired by Robert
Morse, the President of National Research Corporation, who became a
strong supporter of the Society, and the Vice Chairman was John R
Bowman, who would be a prominent figure in the early days of AVS,
serving as President in 1955. In his introduction, Saul Dushman stated
that this was “the first occasion in this country on which a group of
scientists and engineers have gathered to discuss topics in this field”.
There were about 35 attendees and reprints of the fifteen papers were
issued by the National Research Corporation; two of the papers were from
MIT and the rest from industry. The topics ranged from the “measurement
of pumping speeds”, by B.B. Dayton, another prominent figure in the
early AVS, to “ freeze drying of orange juice” . A “High Vacua
Convention” was held in Gleneagles, Scotland in October, 1948. A
Symposium on Vacuum Engineering was organized at French Lick, in May
1952, by the American Institute of Chemical Engineers and abstracts of
the seventeen papers were published in “Vacuum” Vol. 11, p147 (1952).
Ben Dayton again gave a talk, on “Outgassing Properties of Materials
Used in Vacuum Systems” by L.W. Hull, another future AVS President, talked about
“Selection of Vacuum Pumping Systems,” and the first Life (or Honorary)
Member of the society, Kenneth Hickman, co-authored a paper on
“Evaporation Habits of Liquids in Vacuum.” Several hundred people
attended each session of the meeting.
So, there was clearly a need which was not satisfied by
these occasional conferences. Although the Société Francaise des
Ingénieurs et Techniciens du Vide, which became the Société Francaise du
Vide in 1973, had been formed in 1945, there was no equivalent forum in
North America.
During the winter of 1952, Frederick A. McNally, who was
working on spectroscopy with the Jarrell-Ash Company, found it difficult
to obtain current information on the high-vacuum problems with which he
had to deal and wondered if a separate group, devoted to the discussion
of the problems and applications of high vacuum, should be formed. He
apparently urged every company which sold vacuum equipment that they
should do something to provide consolidated information to the users. In
February 1953, he wrote a letter to others who might be interested in
establishing an organization. McNally clearly perceived the need and
thought it would take five years to become recognized as being on a
level with other technical societies. He also suggested that “even a
journal could be published.” The AVS and the Journal of Vacuum
Science and Technology are concrete evidence of McNally’s
foresight.
McNally must have received a good response to his first
letter because he wrote a second letter, dated 6 May 1953, listing
problems that could be discussed at a meeting of an organization whose
common interest was vacuum technology. The subjects he listed were: (l)
vacuum sputtering and evaporation; (2) ionic polishing of surfaces; (3)
electron microscopy, electron diffraction, and x-ray diffraction; (4)
electronic tube manufacture; (5) gas analysis; (6) pumps and pumping
technique; (7) molecular and ionic beam production; (8) vacuum furnace
work; (9) vacuum spectroscopy; (10) discharge phenomena. A sufficient
number of interested people responded to this second letter that a
meeting was arranged by a small group which met in Boston.
The
luncheon meeting
at which the decision was made to form the society was held at the
Commodore Hotel, New York, on 18 June, 1953. The meeting notice stated
that the purpose was “To set up a provisional organization which will
present a symposium on vacuum techniques with the idea of forming a
permanent group during the symposium”.
Reservations,
and a $5 payment in advance, were requested.
Clearly, there had been considerable prior discussion about the
objectives of the meeting; this apparently took place at one, or more,
meetings of a small group in Boston, which included John Durant and A.
John Gale, and presumably McNally. Arrangements
for the meeting were made by McNally, Harry Bliven and Gordon Kiddoo.
Fifty-six people attended that
meeting, but not everyone who wished to attend was
able to do so. Dick Denton recalls that both he and Tom Scratchard could
not be absent from work at the same time, and so only Tom attended
although Dick was an original member. It was a distinguished group;
four of those in the list, plus
Dick Denton, were still
members in 2003, six became
Honorary Members, nine were
Presidents
and Albert Nerken and Medard Welch are
commemorated by two of the major AVS Awards.
McNally chaired the meeting; more than 85% of the attendees were from
commercial operations; almost 60% were associated with vacuum equipment
suppliers; 18% with vacuum tube manufacturers (radio tubes and
lighting), and 9% with vacuum optical coating. Almost all the attendees
were from east coast locations, where the industries were mainly
located.
Although the AIP representative, H.A. Barton, suggested that informal
meetings should be held until the need for a society was verified, those
attending were clearly very aware of the need for an organization to
discuss both practical and scientific aspects of vacuum technology and
for the interchange of information among commercial users of vacuum
equipment. There was a strong feeling that the organization should
represent vacuum equipment manufacturers but that meetings should not be
trade shows. W.
Overacker stressed the immediate need to establish a standards
committee since many of the participants had an interest in comparing
pump performance. So, right at the beginnings of AVS, the strong
interaction between suppliers and users of vacuum equipment and their
interdependence was established.
After
discussion of possible activities, the meeting nominated and elected six
committee chairmen:
-
Permanent
Organization --
Joseph B. Merrill
-
Symposium and
Permanent Financing --
Harry Bliven
-
Symposium
Arrangements --
Everett M. Brown
-
Symposium Program --
Rudolph A. Koehler
-
Symposium Publicity
and Publication --
John H. Durant
-
Standards
-- Benjamin B. Dayton
It was agreed that a General Chairman should be elected
by these chairmen and that he could be either from within or without the
group. It was unanimously agreed that, for the immediate future, the
name “Committee on Vacuum Techniques” would be the official name of the
group; a simple logo was developed,
later in 1953, from the initials CVT. This first organizational meeting
of the embryo society adjourned after deciding that a smaller group
would meet a week later in Boston. At that meeting, held in Cambridge,
Massachusetts on 24 June, 1953, the Society was formally organized under
the name “Committee on Vacuum Techniques” and Joseph Merrill was named
the General Chairman; he was involved in sales and was thus able to meet
all the chairs in the course of his visits to companies. The choice of
the name was a result of following the example of a professor at MIT in
forming a “Committeee on Combustion.” At a subsequent meeting in New
York in August, 1953, Fred McNally was named Chairman of the Education
Committee, increasing the Executive Committee to seven members, which
was a requirement for incorporation.
Incorporation of the Committee on Vacuum Techniques, Inc. followed on 19
October 1953 in accordance with Chapter 180 of the General Laws of the
Commonwealth of Massachusetts. This was only eight months after
McNally’s first letter, which would be remarkably short today, even with
e-mail! The charter signed by the
secretary of Massachusetts stated the purpose of the organization as “To endeavor
to develop, promote and foster the research and education of the art of
vacuum technology scientifically, and for the purpose of dissemination
of this knowledge to the members of the corporation and in this
connection to receive and distribute funds for these purposes. It is not
the intention of the corporation to apply for a license to sell
alcoholic beverages.” There had been an objection to this last clause in
the proposed by-laws at the August, 1953 meeting of the executive
committee, but it was pointed out that the incorporation of a scientific
society and a social club in Massachusetts were covered by the same
rules!
Financial aid for the newly formed organization was
supplied by twelve “Founding Member” companies who supported the
Society with payments of $200 each. These companies, which were involved
mainly in vacuum processing or in the manufacture of vacuum equipment,
were:
-
Central Sales and
Manufacturing Co.
-
Consolidated Vacuum
Corp.
-
General Electric Co.
-
High Vacuum
Equipment Corp.
-
High Voltage
Engineering Corp.
-
Kinney Manufacturing
Corp.
-
Liberty Mirror
Division of Libby-Owens-Ford
-
National Research
Corp.
-
Optical Film
Engineering Co.
-
Sylvania Electric
Products
-
Vacuum Electronics
Engineering Co.
-
W.M. Welch
Manufacturing Co.
The
emphasis of the August, 1953 meeting was on organization of a symposium;
some of these companies only became involved on the promise of a
symposium. The Berkeley Carteret Hotel in Asbury Park, N.J. was selected
because other sites were considered inadequate; the hotel cost was given
as $16 per day and there was discussion as to whether 400 people might
attend! It was decided that the papers at the symposium must not be
“thinly disguised sales pitches,” as had apparently been the case at
some earlier conferences. At the next meeting of the Executive Committee
in December 1953, it was noted that the sponsoring companies wanted the
committee to concentrate on the symposium rather than forming another
society! The symposium was originally scheduled for the spring of 1954
but Everett Brown died suddenly in early 1954, causing a postponement.
Lyle Backer took over as Chairman of the Symposium Committee.
On the last day of that first symposium in 1954, the
first annual Business Meeting of the CVT was called to order by the
President, J.B. Merrill. Changes in the by-laws were discussed and
passed; they provided more continuity on the Executive Committee, with
half the committee chairs to be elected in alternate years.
Harry Bliven, Ben Dayton and Rudy Koehler were re-elected for one year
and Daniel Alpert (Permanent Organization), John Bowman (Publications
and Publicity), Andrew Guthrie (Education) and George Murphy (Symposium
Arrangements) were elected for two years.
However, Alpert and Murphy resigned later that year and were replaced by
William H. McCurdy and John Durant, respectively.
Rudy Koehler was elected the
General Chair.
It was also decided that there would be no additional “founder members.”
A suggestion was made that A.S.D. Barrett be made a
Life Member and this
was done at the second Business Meeting at the 1955 symposium.
At the
second Annual Business Meeting on October 14, 1955, the Officers and
committee chairs were elected; these formed the Executive Committee. The
Officers
consisted of the President (John R Bowman), the Vice President (Andrew
Guthrie), who would become President for the following year, the
Treasurer (John Gale) and the Clerk (Harry Bliven). The six committee
were: Publications and Publicity (Axel Peterson), Symposium Program
(Edmond Perry), Standards and Nomenclature (Ben Dayton), Nominations
(Ken Hickman), Symposium Arrangements (Medard Welch), and Education
(Hubert Schleuning). The basic structure of the current Board of
Directors is evident; there are three Officers plus the Past-President
and six Directors, although
the Directors are no longer committee chairs. At the third Business
Meeting on October 10, 1956, a change in the by-laws was made to define
a regular member.
A
change of name from the Committee on Vacuum Techniques to the
American Vacuum Society, Inc. was first suggested by Charles Gould in
October, 1957 and the change was approved by the Business Meeting on
October 10, 1957. The official approval from the
Commonwealth of
Massachusetts for the change was dated January 30, 1958.
The new Constitution was approved by a mail ballot in 1958; the vote was
198 for and 2 against.
Until
1961, the Executive Committee was appointed and approved by the Business
Meeting, which was held at the Symposium. In addition to the
Officers
and Board Members, others
were sometimes appointed as members of the Executive Committee. For
example, in 1958, the President appointed Lew Hull and John Bowman, who
were respectively Local Arrangements and Education Chair; in 1959 John
Bowman was again appointed as Education Committee Chair and Medard Welch
as the IVOST representative.
During these early years of the Society, as many as eight meetings of
the Executive Committee or Board were held during the year. In addition,
other meetings were held by smaller groups; for example, “the Boston
group” held a meeting on July 11, 1957, between meetings of the
Executive Committee on May 23 and August 8. Many of the meetings were
held in New York City at the offices of Sylvania or G.E. A complaint
that the Board members were leaving the meetings before all the items
were discussed is just as familiar today as when it was made first in
1960! Most of the committee members at these meetings were from
industry; in
1961, the only member from academia, Robert Meissner, died before the
Symposium; in 1961-62, Charles Bachman was the only Board member from a
university. Perhaps due to the changing demands of industry, several
members resigned positions to which they had been elected. J.H. Moore
was elected Treasurer at the 1961 Business Meeting but resigned in
January, 1962 and Raymond Bonenfant was appointed by the President to
fill the vacancy. In December, 1965, Robert Jepsen resigned from the
Board and E.E. Donaldson was appointed to replace him.
A revised Constitution and By-laws was adopted at the
1961 Business Meeting, establishing the procedure for a mail ballot for
the election of Officers and Directors. During 1962, voting for the new
Officers and Directors took place by mail ballot and the results were
then announced at the Business Meeting. This procedure has been followed
in all subsequent years.
However, members could still assign their vote on other
issues to a proxy. In 1967, there were 84 members at the annual Business
Meeting but there were 1072 proxy votes! However, the total was still
less than the 1,685 votes
required to approve a change to the Articles of Organization, which was
required in order to obtain 501.(c), (3) tax status. However, since only
7 votes were cast in opposition to the change, it was decided to
petition the Commonwealth of Massachusetts to accept the change, which
it did. The
attendance at the general meetings varied between 50 in 1961 and 120 in
1960, a much larger number than the current attendance at the annual
Business Meeting, which is still held during the Symposium.
Until the election of 1965, the slate of candidates for
election presented only one nominee for each open position, but the
incoming President, Hans Steinherz, argued that at least two candidates
should be offered for each opening for Director. His suggestion was put
into effect for the 1966 election but a motion to offer at least two
candidates for each of the three Officers was defeated. Although the
official slate continued to offer only a single candidate for each of
the Officers, an additional candidate for President-Elect was nominated
by petition in 1966 and Paul Redhead was elected. The message conveyed
by this election eventually led to a change in policy; starting with the
election of 1969, two candidates for President-Elect have been nominated
every year. It is important to note that two viable candidates
must be nominated, for the difference in votes between candidates can be
very close indeed, being a margin of a single vote (0.1%) in 1981.
However, with one exception, only one nomination has been offered in
each election for the positions of Clerk and Treasurer. Continuity is
essential in these positions; for example, it requires about six months
to transfer the office of Treasurer. For this reason, the holders have
always been re-nominated for at least a second year.
During this era, the familiar acronym AVS was already in
use. There had been several discussions on a suitable logo for the
society. Suggestions had included simple block letters “AVS” as already
used in the Newsletter, McLeod gauges, and Magdeburg hemispheres, but
all had been rejected. In 1962, the Newsletter announced a contest, with
a $100 prize, to the member who designed an attractive symbol and
letterhead. Two winners, J.D. Clark and J.E. Byrne each received $50 for
their entries but no logo was selected for use. It is interesting that
the logo based on the Magdeburg hemispheres was then introduced in 1978!
Membership
The initial members in CVT were those who attended
the annual symposia and they voted at the Business Meeting to elect the
Executive Committee for the succeeding year. So there were essentially
307 members in 1954, the number of attendees at the first symposium. The
membership fee was $3 but this was increased to $5
at the 1958 General Meeting.
Len Beavis recalls attending the
1958 symposium in San Francisco with Norm Wilson;
their membership numbers, 202 and 203, were assigned when they
registered, However,
by 1960, the membership year was the calendar year. The
annual fee was increased to $10 in 1964 but now included JVST
which was mailed to all members; the subscription price for non-members
was $14. Since then, essentially half the membership fee has been
considered as payment for receiving the journal.
By the end of 1958, the
membership
was still only 293 but
it started to grow quite rapidly, reaching 661 in 1960, over 2,000
by 1965, and 2700 in 1967. In 1966, 28% and 13% were members of the Thin
Film and Vacuum Metallurgy Divisions respectively, and there were 15
student members. In an article in the very first issue of JVST in 1964,
the President,
C.H. Blachman
attributed the rapid
increase in membership since 1960 to the developments in thin films and
in space environments. However, a trend which continues today was
already noted; each year, almost 20% of members did not renew and the
net growth resulted from the increase in the number of new members each
year. The very first issue of the Newsletter in 1960 invited members to
pay their dues on time and to encourage colleagues to become members. In
1962, a membership application form and a survey form were mailed out;
the latter requested information from members which was transferred to
punched cards in the office to help the administration.
The Constitutional changes adopted in 1961 recognized
three classes of membership:
Members,
defined as any individual expressing an interest in vacuum science
or engineering.
Honorary Members,
conferred by the AVS Board of Directors on members who have provided
services of great significance to the AVS. The number of Honorary
Members was limited to 0.5 % of the total membership of the Society.
Honorary Members were exempted from payment of dues and are offered
complimentary registration at the National Symposium and several
other events in recognition of their contributions.
Sustaining members,
limited to Institutions and Companies, to provide supplemental
income to support the objectives of the Society. However, this
category was not used until 2003.
Prior to this new classification in 1961, four “Life
Members” had been elected and they are included in the list of
Honorary
Members.
At the business meeting during the 1958
symposium, a Life Membership was presented to Medard Welch by the first
Life Member, A.S.D. Barrett. Ken Hickman and Rudy Koehler were
awarded Life Memberships in 1959; John Gale recounted how he asked
Barrett to keep Hickman
away from the Business Meeting so that he could propose him for the
honor. The first actual Honorary Member was Ben Dayton, in 1963; Medard
Welch made the presentation at the 1963 Symposium and the announcement
in the December, 1963 issue of the Newsletter included a short
biography. Wilfrid Matheson was elected an Honorary Member in 1965.
At
the 1968 business meeting at the Symposium, a change in the Constitution
was approved to divide the member grade into
four categories, setting
specific requirements for each:
Senior Member,
requiring evidence of professional maturity, and endorsement by
three Honorary or Senior Members.
Member,
requiring evidence of professional competence, and the signatures of
two Honorary, Senior, or regular members.
Associate Member,
open to anyone interested in the field of vacuum science and
technology, and requiring one signature from an Honorary,
Senior, or regular member.
Student Member,
open to any full-time college
student.
At least part of the motivation for the change was to be
more consistent with
those of AIP member societies because,
after having been an Affiliate Member of AIP since 1963, AVS was
considering application for full membership. Student membership had
been initiated in 1964, when the annual dues were $5 compared to $10 for
full membership.
Senior Member was to be the highest membership grade
for which application may be made, and requires experience and
attainment reflecting professional maturity. For admission or transfer
to the grade of Senior Member, a candidate shall meet all requirements
for Member grade and, in addition, shall have been in active practice of
his profession for at least 10 years and shall have attained distinction
in his profession by one or more of the following:
-
Publication of original engineering or scientific
papers, books or inventions;
-
Technical direction with evidence of
accomplishment of important scientific or engineering work;
-
Creative contributions to the advancement of the
scientific or engineering profession;
-
Establishment or furtherance of important
scientific or engineering courses.
In the December, 1968 Newsletter, the
Membership Committee invited all Members of the Society, who met the
above qualifications, to submit their applications.
Since it was realized that it would be difficult for applicants to
obtain the three endorsing signatures during the first year, the
Membership Committee undertook to procure them but it was emphasized
that applicants could submit the forms without signatures only until a
sufficient number of candidates had been elected to Senior Membership.
A number
of Members were transferred to the Senior Member category in the next
few years and a list of 85 Senior members was published in the June,
1969 Newsletter. However, the
Membership Committee soon experienced difficulty in fairly
administering admission and eventually suggested that it should be
eliminated. In 1976, a referendum proposing this change was approved
by a 76.7% vote and the constitutional change was confirmed in 1978.
Announcements of interest to members, including the names of the Board
members, were initially included in the Transactions of the National
Symposium but this appeared only once each year.
The Board decided that printing the
attendee list at the Symposium would be discontinued after the 1962
Transactions but a membership list would be mailed annually to each
member. The first Membership Roster to be published was included in the
September/October, 1967 issue of the Journal
of Vacuum Science and Technology.
Starting in 1960, a Newsletter was
published up to four times per year
to inform the members of future events but this was discontinued at the
end of 1964 when the information was included in the new Journal of
Vacuum Science and Technology.
In the first few years of publication, JVST was
used to record many newsworthy AVS events, including announcements of
meetings and awards, and the Membership Roster.
Finance
From the beginning, the Symposium appears to have been
the main source of revenue for the Society. The budget for the period
January 1 to July 31, 1960, printed in the 1961 issue of the Newsletter,
shows that the cash on hand had increased from $26,477.22 to $32,675.25
in that period, mainly due to the revenue from the 1960 Symposium. An
abbreviated summary of the Treasurer’s report for the first six months
of 1962, published in the Newsletter, showed that the net revenue was
approximately $35,000.
By 1963, the annual budget had increased to over $30,000
but the cash balance was more than twice this amount and, to conform to
the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) rules, AVS established a reserve
fund. By 1966, the balance had increased to about $200,000, and an
application for tax exempt status was filed with the IRS. The increase
in assets from 1965 to 1966 was a startling 38% and an Investment
Committee was formed to invest in a trust fund any amount in excess of
three times the annual expense.
Although a registration with the IRS had been filed in
1962, the IRS was apparently unable in 1963 to locate the filing! The
AVS was first granted tax-exempt status by the IRS as a non-profit
organization under clause (501). [c]. (3) on December 5, 1967. This has a
significant financial advantage and great care and effort has been taken
to ensure that all AVS operations conform to the requirements of this
clause. This extends to all the Divisions, Technical Groups and Chapters
since they are all an integral part of the overall AVS, and all are
governed by the overall charter of the Society. Thus, the AVS Board is
responsible for every action carried out at every level of the
society,
In 1967, it was decided that the financial year should
coincide with the calendar year, instead of running from one Symposium
to the next. A new funding method for Sections and Divisions was also
instituted, initially on a trial basis; they were not to accumulate
funds which exceeded three times their average annual expenses.
Administration
In the early days, most of the administrative effort was
provided by the volunteers and, no doubt, their secretaries. John Durant
recalled that he spent about 50% of his time for two years on AVS
business while an employee of the National Research Corporation, with
the full approval of Richard Morse, the company president; Morse was
unsure whether the organization would succeed but, if it did, he wanted
to have an involvement. Durant recounted how Harry Bliven, in the course
of his sales visits, would pick up mail from the rented mail box and
bring it to his office where they would both read it and then make phone
calls to follow up on arrangements. The official address was
Box 1282, Boston 9.
The Society did contract
to have certain office functions performed by Business Aids in Boston;
for example, they printed and mailed the Newsletter and the notices for
the Annual Business Meeting. Mailing was a substantial operation; in
1958, information on the Symposium was sent to 14,000 addresses, which
combined the AVS list of 2,000 with the Welch Manufacturing Company list
of 10,000 and the Consolidated Vacuum Corp. list.
By the
mid-sixties, the administrative load was considerable.
In his first message in
the 1964 Newsletter, the President, Charles Bachman, noted that the load
on the Clerk was extreme because he had to deal with over 2,000 members
and, at the same time, was heading a committee to study alternatives,
which only added to his load!
The Board had previously discussed the need for an
executive office but had deferred any decision until the American
Institute of Physics (AIP) made a decision on the AVS application for
affiliation, since it was expected that AVS would then be able to use
secretarial services at AIP. The AVS had been invited by AIP, in 1958,
to apply but an application was not made until an
Affiliation Committee
had been established and investigated possible collaborations with other
organizations.
An application was made in 1962 and AVS became an AIP Affiliate in April
1963. However, AIP would provide secretarial services only for Members
or Associate Members, not for an Affiliate! Although the AIP Executive
Committee recommended that AVS be upgraded from Affiliate to Associate,
this was not approved by the AIP Governing Board.
A Business Office Committee was then formed in 1964 to
determine how to handle the administrative load. It determined that
$5000 would be required for staff assistance. In 1964, the Board agreed
to a proposal by Wilfrid Matheson to have a married couple, whom he
knew, provide this assistance. From 1964 until the move to New York City
in 1968, H.B. Sloan and his wife,
operated,
under the name Business Aids, the
society “office” in Boston; in 1965, their monthly fee was increased
from $100 to $125. However, their “basement
operation” seems to have been poorly organized. Jack Singleton recalls
that, when Paul Redhead was nominated by petition in 1966, there was
considerable difficulty in determining that signatures on the petition
were those of bona fide members and it was clear that the signed
membership cards were not organized in any way, even though
a key-sort card index system had been
purchased in 1962 for
tracking of the
increasing numbers of new and renewing members. By selectively punching
a card for each member, the whole membership could be sorted into
different groupings using a long needle to select the appropriate
“keyholes.” However, the system was still quite laborious.
In 1966, it was proposed that AVS hire a professional
manager and, at the same time, the American Society for Metals (ASM)
offered to accommodate an AVS Headquarters in their office at Metals
Park, Ohio. A committee, chaired by Dan Bills, was formed to determine a
course of action and it recommended that AVS rent services from AIP and
also hire an Executive Secretary; the annual estimated cost was about
$18,000. The AIP took over responsibility for collecting the membership
dues for 1967 and some additional business was handled by AIP from
January 1, 1967; the AIP Secretary, Wallace Waterfall, appointed Mrs.
Goodfriend as the designated person to handle the AVS business but Mrs.
Emily Wolfe took over this function for the early part of 1968 until the
appointment of Nancy Hammond in May. Mailing continued to be handled by
Business Aids in Boston until the AVS office was set up in the AIP
building in New York City in January 1968 and 335 East 45th
Street became the new address. This move facilitated access to a wide
range of services and an association with many other nonprofit groups
having a strong background in the discipline of physics. The AIP still
manages the pension and health services for AVS employees Jim Lafferty,
who took over as Clerk from Wilfrid Matheson, drove to Boston to pick up
two filing cabinets from Matheson and then delivered them to the AIP
building in New York. The move of office activities from Boston had been
strongly opposed by Matheson, who even appeared, unannounced, at a Board
meeting at the Flying Carpet Motel in Chicago to argue against it.
However, the Board decided to move because the records of activities and
financial transactions which had been provided was unacceptable.
In May 1968, Nancy L. Hammond became the full-time
Executive Secretary, attending her first Board meeting on May 17. She
had been the secretary for the Acoustic Materials Association which
merged with another organization in Chicago and the AIP Secretary
re-assigned Nancy to AVS. She went to Boston in a truck to retrieve the
remaining AVS records from the second bedroom of Matheson’s house; there
were two filing cabinets and a few boxes under the bed! Nancy recalled
that nobody in AIP knew much about the operations of AVS and she really
learned from Jack Singleton when she attended her first National
Symposium in Pittsburgh in October, 1968. So started a productive
association with the Society that lasted for 21 years until her
retirement. Her dedicated service to AVS was recognized when she was
made an Honorary Member
in 1989.
In 1961, as Past-President, Matheson had produced a
“Standard Policy Manual” for conducting the society affairs and such a
manual has been maintained since then to provide all members with
guidelines on how to conduct business at the Society, Division and
Chapter level. The Policy and Procedures Manual is now available on the
web site.
Early in 1962, an Awards Committee was formed to
determine a possible awards structure but no further action was taken at
the time. However, in early 1967, six members were appointed to a
Scholarships Committee to administer
AVS Scholarships
and two graduate
students were later selected to receive scholarships of $4,000; these
first awardees were L.A. Bedell from the University of Minnesota and G.E.
Riach from Brown University.
For 1968, a competition for three such Scholarships was announced but
the committee chose to renew the two Scholarships for a second year.
In 1965, the Sloan Instrument Company offered to fund
prizes of $500 and $300 for the best papers presented in the Thin Film
sessions; the proposed name was the “Bob Meissner Prize” but the offer
was declined.
One of the principal objectives of those forming the
society was to organize a symposium for the free exchange of information
about vacuum technology and related processes. In fact, some of the
sponsors and potential members considered that this was the only
function required!
The
first Symposium was held on 16-18 June, 1954 at the Hotel
Berkeley-Carteret in Asbury Park in New Jersey. Asbury Park was then a
popular resort on the coast and a good location for a symposium
combining work and social interaction. John Gale recalled that the
“girls” there were disappointed because they had heard that it was a
meeting of vacuum cleaner salesmen, from whom they had expected good
business! The total registration fee, including accommodation and meals
and a copy of the Transactions, was $65; the fee for attendees not
resident in the hotel was $15. Rudy Koehler was the Program Chair and
Lyle Backer the Chair of the Symposium Arrangements Committee
after the sudden death of Everett Brown a few months earlier. Vannevar Bush, who had been known by several members while at
MIT,
declined to act as Honorary Chairman of the symposium but Kenneth
Hickman, who had developed the oil diffusion pump, accepted the
invitation. The three day Symposium consisted of 35 papers; half of the
papers given were on equipment, and half on related topical subjects. The 307 registrants
represented equipment manufacturers, industrial processors, sales
organizations, and government and university research laboratories and
came from Germany, England, and Canada, as well as from all parts of the
USA; many from Europe came by ship and thus invested several weeks in
the trip. Some
industrial organizations did not view attendance at the Symposium as
being useful and at least one of the attendees had to take vacation to
participate! At a
dinner on 16
June, A.S.D. Barrett gave a talk on “Vacuum Technology in Europe" and
Hickman told a number of humorous and unusual vacuum stories.
Visual
aids for the first symposium presentations used lantern slides, which
meant that the talk had to be planned well ahead of the presentation!
The first annual Business Meeting was held immediately after the session
ended, at mid-morning on Friday;
Rudy Koehler and George Murphy were elected Program and Symposium
Arrangements chairs for the 1955 symposium but the latter resigned later
in 1954 and John Durant took over. At the Business Meeting, it was
announced that a course on
Vacuum Technique would be offered at Boston University in the fall.
One
of the complaints about the first Symposium program was that there was
insufficient time for questions, although the speakers were
congratulated on “making themselves available” in the late afternoon and
early evening. As a result,
only 20 papers were selected for the
program at the second
Symposium in Pittsburgh and more time allowed for discussion. The banquet
speaker, Willy Ley, gave a talk on the "Physics and Engineering of a
Satellite Shot.” At the business meeting on October 14, 1955, C.H. Bowman
was elected President. While the first Symposium was held in summer, all
subsequent Symposia have been held in late fall.
The number of papers submitted for the 1956 Symposium in
Chicago was 30% higher than expected!
For a paper to be presented at the
Symposium, the manuscript had to be approved by the Program Chair. This
procedure had been instituted to ensure that the papers were not just
sales pitches by equipment manufacturers but, as the number of
submissions increased, it was used to select the best papers. Forty-one
papers were selected for the program. There were 549 attendees at the
Symposium! Seating was classroom style, which was welcomed by the
attendees because it assisted in taking notes; it was repeated in 1957.
There was also a balcony for seating non-member “guests”, who were
mainly students from Chicago universities and colleges. The session
chairs held a breakfast meeting with the speakers, a function which was
continued for several years. The banquet speaker was Nikolai Kurti, a
renowned low temperature experimentalist from Oxford University.
For
the 1957 Symposium in Boston, the registration fee of $35 included, in
addition to the membership, the sessions and the Transactions, two
lunches, coffee for three mornings and the banquet. However, the Board
were concerned about the high cost price of $19 per person for the food
functions! The fee for the Ladies program was $15, including the banquet
and a day’s tour with a visit to a museum. In addition to the
presentations, there was a panel discussion on “Vacuum Technology: Today
& Tomorrow”; the panel members were Rudy Koehler, of G.E, Hubert
Schwleuning from the Polytechnic Institute of Brooklyn, G.W. Oetjen of
Leybold, Hans Steinhertz from NRC, F. Duncan of the Bekeley-Graham
Manufacturing Co., and William Di Pietro, of Vacuum Specialties Co. The
banquet speaker was M. Stanley Livingstone of MIT who talked about the
challenges in particle accelerators. Dorothy Hoffman gave her first
talk, "Resistance–Temperature Characteristics of Evaporated Cr films”,
at a Symposium; she later became the first woman to be President of
AVS, and indeed of any scientific society in North America, and left a
very large bequest which has funded, since 1999, awards to students
attending the International Symposium.
Abstracts of talks at the 1958 Symposium in San Francisco were printed
in the program booklet in an 8x5 inch format with a plain blue cover.
Len Beavis recalls that the hot items being discussed at the 1958
Symposium were non-evaporable getters, ion pumps and CF flange all metal
seals, and that Paul Redhead talked about ionization gages. So many
papers were received that sessions were held in parallel for the first
time; there were eight sessions over three days. There was an opening
address by the President, Medard Welch, and then a plenary talk on “High
Vacuum Technology and the Space Age” by Richard S. Morse, who was
Chairman of the Army Scientific Advisory Panel. The banquet speaker was Luis W. Alvarez on “The Hydrogen Bubble Chamber." At the Business
Meeting, a Life Membership was presented to Medard Welch by the first
Life Member, A.S.D. Barrett.
The
same format of meeting continued in 1959 at Philadelphia but talks were
limited to 25 minutes and there were parallel sessions either morning or
afternoon on each of the three days. This was the first Symposium which
was actually referred to as the National Symposium; the Board noted that
it was to be called “the 6th National Symposium, held in
1959." There were 58 papers contributed by 137 authors with about 40
different affiliations; eight papers were from universities and ten from
foreign countries. Erwin Muller gave a talk on the “Field Emission
Microscope” at the banquet which was attended by 500 members and
included wives. Over a hundred members attended the Business Meeting,
at which Ken Hickman and Rudy Koehler were awarded
Life Memberships. Closed circuit TV was available in the hotel for
advertising the Symposium events; for an hour per day for the three days
of the Symposium, the cost was about $150.
For the 1960 Symposium in Cleveland, the “Call for
Papers” was published in the very first issue of the Newsletter; papers
were requested on “Production of Vacuum”, “Components of Vacuum
Systems”, “Measurement and Maintenance of Vacuum”, “Applications of
Vacuum”, and “Basic Science”.
The deadline for receipt of the manuscript was four
months before the Symposium, and there were complaints that this was
much too early for the work presented at the Symposium to be new!
The registration fee, which included a
copy of the Transactions, had increased to $35; the fee for the Ladies
Program was $15, including flowers! Because of
the increasing number of papers, there were parallel sessions throughout
the meeting, except for Friday afternoon. However,
this was obviously not well received
because no parallel sessions were to be permitted at future Symposia,
but 1961 was exempted because it was combined with the International
Vacuum Congress. There was also a
panel discussion, chaired by Don Santeler,
on “Pressure Measurements -Their Apparatus & Techniques”, The five
papers given by the panel members were published both in the
Transactions and in a special supplement for members, which also
contained a summary of the discussion. The banquet was preceded by a one
hour reception; a photograph of the formal “President’s receiving line” was included in
the Transactions. The banquet speaker was Ira H Abbott who spoke on
“NASA Ames Research Activities”. Apparently a highlight of the symposium
was a film from Bell Telephone Labs showing an imploding glass chamber!
New
ground was broken in 1961 in Washington, D.C. when the Symposium was
combined with the Second International Vacuum Congress and a Vacuum
Equipment Exhibit was initiated. In March, 1960, the International
Organization for Vacuum Science and Technology (IVOST), which became the
International Union of Vacuum, Technique and Applications (IUVSTA) in
1962, accepted an AVS invitation to combine their triennial Congress
with the 1961 Symposium. A measure of the changing times is that an
invitation to host the Congress must now be submitted more than 6 years
before the event!
The
combination of the Second International Vacuum Congress (IVC-2)
and the 8th National Symposium resulted in a meeting which was
roughly double the size of the preceding
symposia.
The program
booklet was printed in a 6x9.5 inch format.
About 1800 people from 20 nations registered
for the joint meeting with another 200 registering only for the exhibit;
there were also 100 ladies in the “Ladies Program”. A sum of $6000 was
available to aid foreign scientists to attend; the program committee had
obtained commitments of $2000 each from the Army, Navy and Air Force
which was mostly in the form of free transport via Military Air
Transport Services. To accommodate the large number of papers, two or
three parallel sessions were scheduled during the week. The new film
“Introduction to High Vacuum”
was shown throughout the week and at the Wednesday evening banquet, at
which the speaker was A. Kantrowitz of Avco-Everett Research Lab on
“Engineering Implications of Plasma Dynamics”; about 800 people attended
the banquet.
The
Vacuum Equipment Exhibit held in conjunction with the IVC-2 was intended
to provide a showcase for the newest in vacuum technology, which it did
very successfully, as well as providing additional revenue. Eighty
companies occupied 90 booths.
A guidebook to the technical exhibits contained booth locations,
descriptions of the exhibitors’ equipment and advertising; advertising
rates were $100 per page, $55 for a half-page and $30 for a
quarter-page. At least 3000 copies of the 7-1/4x10 inch format book were
printed. The net income from this book went to the IOVST (now IUVSTA).
The
success of the Exhibit led the Board to consider making it an annual
event and the 1961 Business Meeting voted to poll the membership by
mail. Of the 541 members who voted, which was about 50% of the
membership, only 25 were against an exhibit, 83 favored an annual
exhibit, 321 preferred alternate years and 104 wanted one only every
third year. The Board decided in May, 1962 to take the course favored by
the majority.
One
concern in 1961 was the rental cost of the projectors for the talks and
the Purchased Equipment Committee was established to determine whether
AVS should own this equipment. This discussion has been repeated every
few years as these costs continue to climb, but the contract with most
hotels and convention centers requires that the equipment be supplied by
a local contractor.
While
the annual Symposia were designed to be essentially self-supporting, the
triennial International Congress had to provide the major source of
income for the IOVST. The added number of papers at the combined
Congress and Symposium substantially increased the cost of publishing
the proceedings, especially as the IOVST required that the abstracts and
manuscripts be accepted in any of the three official IOVST
languages (English, French and German). As a result of the higher costs
involved with this meeting, the Board continually emphasized that the
Symposium had to be profitable, not just break even! Of course, the
income came from the attendees’ registration fees, and, in later years,
from the Exhibit.
The
registration fees for these early Symposia were listed in two ways; Plan
1 included admission to the banquet, and the reception which preceded
it, and a copy of the Transactions; Plan 2 covered only the technical
sessions and the reception. In the first announcement for the 1962
Symposium, Plan 1 cost $39 for members and $44 for non-members; Plan 2
was $15 for members and $20 for non-members.
The Transactions could be purchased separately for $18, with a reduced
price of $14.50 if they were paid for at the Symposium, about six months
before they were actually available. However, the Plan 1 fees were
later increased by $2.50 because of the increased size and cost of the
Transactions; the number of papers had increased to 93 from the original
estimate of 70.
There
were about 1,300 registrants at the 1962 Symposium
in Los Angeles. With the greatly increased number compared to 1960, it
was necessary to reverse the earlier
decision and papers were given in two parallel sessions. The program
book was a 5x8 inch format with a yellow cover.
This same format was maintained in following years with a different
colored cover; blue in 1963 and green in 1964. The banquet speaker was Robert F. Bacher of
the California Inst. of Technology on “The Impact of Technology on
Science”
The
1963 Symposium in Boston corresponded with the tenth anniversary of the
Society and the international appeal of the Symposium was already being
demonstrated; of the 182 abstracts submitted, 26 were “foreign”, 86 were
from “east coast”, 42 from “west coast” and 25 from the central USA.
A summary of the
talks given at the 10th National Symposium was given in an
article in Physics Today [H.L. Caswell, W.J. Lange and L.E. Preuss,
Physics Today p41, July 1964]. The article noted that more than 100
papers were presented in the technical sessions which were attended by
1590 “scientists, engineers, and related technical people” with an
additional 800 attending only the exhibit. There were also 100 in the
“Ladies program”. The papers were reported in sections on gauges, pumps
and components, thin films, friction and cleavage studies at UHV, and
high dosage radiation effects on vacuum systems and techniques. It is
interesting to note that, while many of the authors came from companies
which are still involved in AVS activities (e.g. IBM, Varian, Ultek, CVC,
Leybold, Edwards, SAES ), a number represented companies which are no
longer represented, or in some cases do not exist (e.g. RCA, Microwave
Associates, Bendix, Westinghouse, Mallory, Erie Technological Products.
Nuclide Corp). Vincent Schaefer, Director of Research of the
Atmospheric Sciences Research Center at SUNY gave the banquet address on
“Adventures in the Atmosphere”.
The
first Vacuum Exhibit at a National Symposium was held in 1963 in Boston. RobRoy Cyr was appointed Exhibit Chairman at the 1962 Annual Meeting and
the Committee arranged for the Exhibit to be managed by the Professional
Research Institute in Boston for a fee which was 25% of the gross
revenue. The
response to the announcement of the Exhibit was unexpected; 20 booths
were already reserved by January and, by April, it was evident that
there would be insufficient space since over 100 exhibitors had made
requests and some of these were for two or three booths. It was decided
to draw lots for the available 76 booths, but this was not popular with
companies which had exhibited in 1961! They were assured that they would
be given preference for booths at the next Exhibit, scheduled for 1965
in New York. As part of the Exhibit, there were tours to two local
companies in the Boston area, Kinney Manufacturing and High Voltage
Engineering.
In an article in the first issue of JVST, the President C.J.
Blachman, noted that the Symposium was already so large
that there were few cities with hotels which were large enough to house
it! It was already realized after the 1959 Symposium that the increasing
size of the symposium made it necessary to select the sites more than
one or two years ahead! It was decided in 1964 that it was now necessary
to plan symposia sites five years in advance and Seattle was immediately
selected for 1969. However, some of the sites which had already been
reserved could not provide adequate space for the Exhibit. Due to space
and time limitations, only half of the 166 abstracts submitted for the
1964 Symposium could be accepted; a 50% rejection rate would now be
considered unthinkable! The Symposium program was printed in JVST for
the first time. A concerted publicity effort was mounted with a press
kit sent to all radio and TV stations in New York, as well as the
newspapers, and it was also sent to all the national science writers.
The banquet speaker was John C. Lilly on “Research with the Bottlenose
Dolphin”. Although the Board had decided that there would not be an
Exhibit, some companies mounted a “non-authorized exhibit” during the
symposium; this may have persuaded the Board that in future the Exhibit
should be an annual event!
Since 1965, the Exhibit has been an integral and
important part of every Symposium. In early 1965, AIP’s offer to manage
the Exhibit for a fee of 25% of the gross revenue was accepted and,
starting with the 12th National Symposium in New York in
1965, every Exhibit has been managed by the American Institute of
Physics. The AIP representative until 1995 was
Ed Greeley, a fast
talking New Yorker who never seemed to have a problem, even in the midst
of fighting fires. Sixty-five companies rented 100 booths for the 1965
Exhibit; the revenue was $37,000. This success led the Board to decide
to hold the exhibit each year, rather than in alternate years, provided
that two-thirds of the exhibitors were in favor.
For
the 1965 Symposium, which was held at the Sheraton Hotel in New York, an
epidiascope was provided for projection of diagrams; this was the
fore-runner of the overhead projector and required less preparation than
the usual lantern slides. Both were replaced by 35mm slides during this
first Era; these were cheaper and easier to make but they still required
preparation in advance of the meeting. With the introduction of overhead
projectors in later years, it became much easier to prepare the visual
“aids” just before the presentation and the standards generally
declined. Closed circuit television was also available for the first
time during this Symposium for listing the session topics!
For the first time, there were parallel sessions
throughout the 1966 Symposium in San Francisco. Up to three parallel
sessions were necessary to accommodate the Thin Film Division program in
parallel with the Symposium; it was originally planned to be held on the
preceding day, as in 1965, but there was no space in the hotel. The
Exhibit was held in the Masonic Temple which had marble floors; because
the Exhibit traffic was hard on these, AVS received a bill for
“refurbishing”. The Temple was at the top of the hill while the
technical sessions were held in a hotel at the bottom of the hill;
attendees got exercise as well as information. Extended abstracts of the
talks, printed on letter size pages and hardbound, were issued to all
the attendees but no proceedings were published.
In 1967, there were a total of 12 sessions. The Exhibit
hours were from 9am to 6pm on the first two days and from 9 a.m. till 3 p.m.
on the third day. Although there were many small variations tried over
the years, it is perhaps surprising that they are not very different
from the current practice!
There were a total of thirteen sessions in 1968, again
indicating the growth of the Symposium. The 71
booths
had to be squeezed into every available space at the Pittsburgh Hilton
and this resulted in serious power outages to some sections of the
Exhibit, causing substantial disruption. Ed Greeley’s experience was
fully tested in blunting the impact of these space problems so that they
did not fall upon the eight members of the Local Arrangements
Committee!
Until 1970 an evening banquet, attended by a respectable
fraction of the attendees, was part of every Symposium. The Business
Meeting was held during the banquet, ensuring a large attendance at the
meeting! Almost 800 attended in 1963. The banquet provided a forum for
the introduction of honored guests, Society notables, the new Board, and
those responsible for the Symposium arrangements. There was usually a
noted speaker, with talks on topics ranging from science to the ascent
of Everest; Sir Edmund Hillary
was the speaker at San Francisco in 1966.
At the head table were
the Officers and other luminaries, resplendent in formal dress, in honor
of the occasion. A Board motion to allow business suits
to be worn was
defeated in 1964 but the requirement was relaxed in 1967 when only those
seated at the head table were required to wear tuxedos. It was finally
abandoned in 1968 when the President, Paul Redhead, made it optional and
stated that he would wear a business suit!.
The possibility of holding the Symposium outside the USA
was first raised in 1967 by Paul Redhead. AVS suggested to IUVSTA that
the joint AVS/IUVSTA conference be held in Montreal in 1974 but IUVSTA
preferred Boston in 1971. The only National Symposium outside the USA
was held in Toronto in 1990.
Continued
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