Donald Christiansen, who reworked IEEE Spectrum from a promising however erratic expertise 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 Struggle II as an 18-year-old. He
served aboard the plane serviceSan Jacinto, an expertise that led a few years later to a guide, The Saga of the San Jac. After the battle, 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, participating tales. By 1959 he was a daily 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 turned 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 employees of about 50 individuals, 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 applications and smiling resolutely. A “Individuals” section 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 various 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 Training: A Fundamental Nationwide Useful resource.” Throughout this period, mathematical equations sporadically swarmed into the function properly like ants at a picnic.
After about seven years of this,
Donald G. Fink, the IEEE’s govt director (then referred to 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 operating this journal?” Fink additionally knew who he needed for the function: 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 easy: Ban mathematical equations; publish shorter, tightly edited function articles; and embrace extra staff-written options. And he insisted on being not simply the editor but in addition 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 a permanent curiosity in moral conflicts skilled by engineers. In 2014, he advised me how this preoccupation started. Within the late Nineteen Fifties, CBS was competing with RCA for an enormous contract from Motorola to provide tubes, together with cathode-ray tubes, for shade televisions. A bunch 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. So that they mainly 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 employees editor in 1984. In these days, the IEEE occupied a few flooring in a constructing on the northwest nook of forty seventh Road and First Ave., within the tony Turtle Bay space of Manhattan. Don’s workplace, on the eleventh ground, 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 gentle, was like a museum, decked out with numerous certificates, diplomas, recognitions, and awards Don had received in reference to Spectrum or one among his different ventures, together with McGraw-Hill’s Commonplace Handbook of Digital Engineering, a money cow for a few years.
Don, it could be mentioned, was not a gregarious man. Throughout a typical day, he principally stored to his workplace, his solitude gently however firmly protected by his assistant, the late
Nancy Hantman. Nonetheless, he sometimes shocked us staffers. At some point, 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 individuals loads of room to maneuver. It led to many nice tales—and journalism awards. In 1979,
Spectrum defined to the world precisely what triggered the partial meltdown in a reactor core on the Three Mile Island nuclear plant in Pennsylvania. In 1982, simply after the battle within the Falklands, the journal made a wide-ranging evaluation of quickly advancing navy 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—rely ’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 referred to as “Backscatter” for As we speak’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 a tremendous time in expertise. He by no means misplaced his ardour for skilled issues: 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 approach 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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