Donald Christiansen, who reworked IEEE Spectrum from a promising however erratic know-how journal right into a repeat Nationwide Journal Award winner, died on 2 October 2024, on the age of 97, in Huntington, N.Y.
After rising up in Plainfield, N.J., Don joined the U.S. Navy throughout World Battle II as an 18-year-old. He
served aboard the plane carrierSan Jacinto, an expertise that led a few years later to a e book, The Saga of the San Jac. After the warfare, in 1950, he obtained a bachelor’s diploma in electrical engineering at Cornell College. From 1950 to 1962 he labored for CBS’s Electronics division, an arm of the broadcasting community headquartered in Danvers, Mass. It manufactured vacuum tubes for radios and televisions, and later, semiconductors.
However Don wasn’t a typical engineer. He had a burning need to write down and had a knack for crafting deft, partaking tales. By 1959 he was an everyday contributor to
Electronics World, a well-liked newsstand journal revealed by Hugo Gernsback.
It was a modest begin to what can be a fast rise in publishing. A few years later, at age 35, he grew to become a full-time editor at
Digital Design. In 1966, he moved to McGraw-Hill’s Electronics journal, the kingpin publication of a thriving subsegment of the enterprise press. And some years after that, he was editor in chief. In these days, a problem of Electronics may need as many as 250 pages. The journal had an editorial workers of about 50 folks, with bureaus in Bonn, London, and Tokyo.
IEEE Spectrum, in the meantime, was a fledgling journal. Following the IEEE’s formation in 1963, Spectrum made its debut in January 1964. These early problems with Spectrum had been a cool hybrid of home organ and journal. There was a “Information of the IEEE” column, usually illustrated with posed photos of convention organizers holding printed packages and smiling resolutely. A “Folks” phase famous profession milestones of IEEE members, illustrated with but extra resolute smiles.
In April 1993, IEEE Spectrum received a Nationwide Journal Award for its reporting on Iraq’s effort to construct an atomic bomb. The staffers who labored on the report had been John A. Adam [center] and Glenn Zorpette [right]. Editor in Chief Donald Christiansen is at left.IEEE Spectrum
The options had been a diverse combine, usually illustrated with graphs, charts, and tables. Some articles had been solely marginally extra readable than technical papers, whereas others had been sprawling, thinky items of precise or imagined social relevance. For instance, the second difficulty of
Spectrum featured an article titled “Graduate Schooling: A Fundamental Nationwide Useful resource.” Throughout this period, mathematical equations sporadically swarmed into the characteristic nicely like ants at a picnic.
After about seven years of this,
Donald G. Fink, the IEEE’s government director (then known as a “normal supervisor”), determined it was time for Spectrum to have a full-time skilled editor in chief. By then, Fink had grown weary of fielding the query “Who’s actually working this journal?” Fink additionally knew who he needed for the position: Christiansen. Like Christiansen, Fink had been the highest editor at Electronics.
Fink requested Christiansen to write down a proposal describing what he would do with
Spectrum if he had been the editor. Christiansen’s plan was simple: Ban mathematical equations; publish shorter, tightly edited characteristic articles; and embody extra staff-written options. And he insisted on being not simply the editor but additionally the writer of Spectrum. Fink submitted Christiansen’s proposal to the IEEE board of administrators, which agreed to all of the situations.
As editor in chief, Don confirmed an everlasting curiosity in moral conflicts skilled by engineers. In 2014, he advised me how this preoccupation started. Within the late Fifties, CBS was competing with RCA for an enormous contract from Motorola to provide tubes, together with cathode-ray tubes, for coloration televisions. A gaggle of Motorola executives needed to go to CBS’s manufacturing amenities to see the CRTs being produced. The issue was that on the time, CBS had solely six working CRTs and was experiencing issues with the manufacturing line. In order that they principally orchestrated a phony demonstration, making it seem as if the road was finishing the CRTs in actual time, earlier than the guests’ eyes.
The ruse labored. CBS landed the contract and shortly mounted the issues with the manufacturing line. However Don by no means forgot that have.
Spectrum’s November 1979 difficulty, containing a particular report on the accident on the Three Mile Island nuclear plant, received a Nationwide Journal Award.IEEE Spectrum
Don employed me to be a
Spectrum workers editor in 1984. In these days, the IEEE occupied a few flooring in a constructing on the northwest nook of forty seventh Avenue and First Ave., within the tony Turtle Bay space of Manhattan. Don’s workplace, on the eleventh flooring, was within the southeast nook of the constructing, overlooking the United Nations rose backyard and, past that, the East River and Queens. The immense workplace, flooded with pure mild, was like a museum, decked out with varied certificates, diplomas, recognitions, and awards Don had received in reference to Spectrum or considered one of his different ventures, together with McGraw-Hill’s Customary Handbook of Digital Engineering, a money cow for a few years.
Don, it is likely to be mentioned, was not a gregarious man. Throughout a typical day, he principally saved to his workplace, his solitude gently however firmly protected by his assistant, the late
Nancy Hantman. Nonetheless, he often stunned us staffers. In the future, out of the blue, he introduced a pictures contest after which submitted some entries of his personal. These included a few very slickly lit portraits of vogue fashions sporting leotards.
Don’s rigorously top-down managerial fashion was very a lot a product of his time. He had an eye fixed for expertise, and he believed in giving folks loads of room to maneuver. It led to many nice tales—and journalism awards. In 1979,
Spectrum defined to the world precisely what induced the partial meltdown in a reactor core on the Three Mile Island nuclear plant in Pennsylvania. In 1982, simply after the warfare within the Falklands, the journal made a wide-ranging evaluation of quickly advancing army applied sciences. In 1985, we unraveled the chain of occasions that led inexorably to the breakup of AT&T and accurately predicted what it could imply for the way forward for communications. And in 1992, we detailed how Iraq tried to construct an atomic bomb, and the way the invention of that clandestine effort led to new concepts about safeguarding nuclear weaponry. All 4 of these investigations received Nationwide Journal Awards, placing Spectrum among the many only a few—depend ’em on one hand—affiliation magazines ever to win the awards repeatedly.
For a few years after retiring from the IEEE, Don wrote a well-liked column known as “Backscatter” for Right now’s Engineer, a publication ofIEEE-USA, the IEEE’s advocacy group for U.S. engineers. He wrote about just about no matter he needed, however many columns drew on his firsthand publicity to among the nice occasions and other people throughout an incredible time in know-how. He by no means misplaced his ardour for skilled considerations: For a number of years he organized a seminar on engineering ethics for the Lengthy Island, N.Y., IEEE part, of which he was an energetic member.
Don straddled the worlds of engineering and publishing in a method that few others ever did, earlier than or after him. In doing so, he left an indelible mark on
IEEE Spectrum, which nonetheless bears traces of his editorship. He additionally confirmed many people how expansive an engineering journal could possibly be.
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