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12.09
Making the A-List
By Donald Christiansen
The most famous A-list, perhaps,
was Mrs. William Astor’s “Four Hundred,” a list
of socialites of standing sufficiently high as
to warrant being invited by Mrs. Astor to one of
her grandiose balls. Ward McAllister, who is
presumed to be the originator of the Four
Hundred, sometime in the late 1890s, explained
the criteria in part: “If you go outside that
number you strike people who are either not at
ease in a ballroom or else make other people not
at ease.”
I did not check, but I do not
believe there were many engineers in Mrs.
Astor’s Four Hundred. Earlier this year,
however, the Museum of the City of New York, in
celebration of the 400th anniversary
of Henry Hudson’s arrival in New York (then
unnamed, of course), compiled its own “New York
City 400.” When I heard it was to cover the
400-year history of New York, and would also be
more eclectic and with less concern for social
status, my hopes rose. I thought of some
engineers who I’d probably find amid this Four
Hundred.
So I began to peruse the list.
Here’s Thomas Edison! Good. How about Nikola
Tesla? Nowhere to be found. Aha! David Sarnoff.
But Edwin Armstrong did not make it. As I
continued my search I found some more surprises.
Here’s Boss Tweed, the corrupt Tammany Hall
politician; racketeer Dutch Schulz; mobster
Meyer Lansky; bootlegger and drug dealer Arnold
Rothstein. No wonder there’s no room for
Armstrong and Tesla. Perhaps they’d sooner not
be in the company of these shady characters.
Let’s scan the list again. Hmmm.
Here’s Donald Trump, Mel Brooks, Michael
Bloomberg, and billiard champion Willie Mosconi.
There surely must be someone here who actually
invented or built something! Ah, yes. I see John
Roebling, Robert Fulton, Samuel Morse, Willis
Carrier, Elisha Otis, Stanford White, and Isador
Rabi. But that seems to be about it. The rest of
the 400 consists largely of entertainers,
artists, sports figures, and politicians. I
wondered, for example, why there were none of
the Bell Labs engineers or scientists who
labored at the West Street facilities in
Manhattan from 1925 to 1966. Or of famous
Consolidated Edison engineers.
The Search Goes On
My disappointment spurred me to
look to other lists where I suspected the
contributions of engineers would be met with
greater warmth and appreciation. I went to the
Academy of Television Arts & Sciences’ Hall of
Fame. When it began in 1984, the selection
committee stated that the honor would be for
“persons who have made outstanding contributions
in the arts, sciences, or management of
television, based upon either cumulative
contributions and achievement or a singular
contribution or achievement.” That sounded
encouraging, so I scanned the list of inductees
from 1984 to the present. At the very least I
expected to find Vladimir Zworykin, Philo
Farnsworth, and John Logie Baird to represent
the “sciences of television.” Zip. But there was
David Sarnoff—small consolation as he could
easily have qualified on the basis of his
management skills and fierce persistence in
commercializing television. Almost all the other
inductees are or had been on-screen
personalities—Lucille Ball, Milton Berle, Sid
Caesar, Johnny Carson, and Walter Cronkite, for
example.
Does it really matter that our
engineering colleagues are universally
overlooked by the arbiters of most popular
A-lists? We have our own lists. Here are a few
of those honors bestowed upon Vladimir Zworykin,
who was omitted from both the New York City 400
and the Television Hall of Fame. He was elected
to The National Inventors Hall of Fame, the
National Academy of Arts and Sciences, the
National Academy of Engineering, the National
Academy of Sciences, as an IEEE Fellow, an Eta
Kappa Nu Eminent Member, and a member of Sigma
Xi. And a few of his medals: the AAAS Rumford
Medal, the AIEE Edison Medal, the AIEE Lamme
Medal, the National Medal of Science, the French
Legion of Honor, the IEE (British) Faraday
Medal, and the French Union of Inventors Medal.
I’m supposing that my
non-engineering neighbors may never have heard
of most of these honors, nor be able to name an
engineer who might have received one. From their
viewpoint, our A-lists may all be “B” lists. If
so, it may be due in part to our generally nerdy
image and avoidance of the spotlight. On those
occasions when an Emmy or Oscar is given for a
technical development, the awardee is seldom
seen in prime time. I imagine the award being
presented in some obscure back room with a few
friends and family present.
So be it. Let Boss Tweed and
Lucy make the big-time lists. Let’s just labor
on, hoping that our accomplishments change the
world for the better. If we are rewarded with a
few citations along the way, we can hang them in
our dens at home, being careful not to place
them in too conspicuous a location.
Resources:
Patterson, J.E., The First 400:
Mrs. Astor’s New York in the Gilded Age,
Rizzoli, 2000.
Roberts, S., “400 Years and 400
Names: Museum Tweaks City A-List,” The New
York Times, Sept. 9, 2009.
For more about technical awards
and recognitions:
There are some halls of fame to
which we may not aspire, as suggested in the
following: Conniff, R., “Your Name Here: If
you’re not yet a Hall-of-Famer, maybe you’re
just not trying,” Smithsonian, January
2009.
Donald Christiansen is the
former editor and publisher of IEEE Spectrum
and an independent publishing consultant. He is
a Fellow of the IEEE. He can be reached at
donchristiansen@ieee.org.
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