The Contributions and the Legacy of the Society’s Founding Members
In the mid-1950s, a group of professionals in the electrical engineering specialty of radio frequency interference (RFI) began to formulate the idea of creating an organization devoted to their specific technical area of expertise. These informal discussions reached a new level at a luncheon on February 27, 1957, during the Third Conference on Radio Interference Reduction, sponsored by the United States Army Signal Engineering Laboratories and conducted by the Armour Research Foundation of the Illinois Institute of Technology in Chicago.
In his luncheon speech, Fred Nichols, Vice-Chairman of the Radio Interference Technical Committee of the Los Angeles area, proposed starting a National Professional Group on RFI. Six other individuals at the luncheon, including Anthony Zimbalatti, Milton Kant, Harold Schwenk, John Lucyk, Albert Ruzgis, and S. Nellis, enthusiastically endorsed the idea and volunteered to make it happen.
This core group, along with Vince Mancino and other United States engineers, eventually gathered 325 signatures on a petition that was delivered to the New York Office of the Institute of Radio Engineers (IRE) in July 1957. The petition to form a group devoted to RFI was approved by the IRE on October 10, 1957, and the first organizational meeting of the Professional Group on RFI (PGRFI) was held on November 20, 1957 in Asbury Park, NJ.
(A side note. In 1957, the Institute of Radio Engineers (IRE) had 57,000 members and was larger than its rival association, the American Institute of Electrical Engineers (AIEE). When the IRE and the AIEE merged in 1963 to form the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE), the IRE had 96,500 members versus the AIEE’s 57,000 members! And the PGRFI was the predecessor of the Electromagnetic Compatibility (EMC) Society of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE)).
This article addresses the pioneering work of Harald Schwenk, Fred Nichols, James McNaul, Milton Kant, Dr. Ralph Showers, Anthony Zimbalatti, Vince Mancino, and Sam Burruano. When we celebrated the 50th Anniversary of the EMC Society in 2007 in Hawaii (the 50th state in the United States), we had six very active Founders join us for the festivities. Each of those six founding members, McNaul, Kant, Showers, Mancino, Burruano, and Zimbalatti, are highlighted in this article. Sadly, Schwenk and Nichols passed away prior to the 50th Anniversary festivities, and all of the founding members of the EMC Society have passed away since then, with Milton Kant the last to pass away in May 2023 at the age of 97.
A Brief History of the Founders of the EMC Society
Harold R. Schwenk
The first chairman of the Professional Group on RFI (PGRFI) was Harold Raymond Schwenk, one of the engineers who attended the 1957 Chicago Luncheon. Schwenk was known for his teaching capability, especially with his fellow engineers. He joined the Sperry Gyroscope Company in NY, where he was involved with analyzing, designing, testing, and reworking electronics equipment to assure compliance with RFI and electromagnetic interference (EMI) requirements. In addition to founding the PGRFI, he also founded the Metropolitan New York IEEE EMC Society Chapter and served as chairman of that Chapter several times.
In 1967, he took his EMC expertise to Grumman Corporation in Bethpage, NY. There, Mr. Schwenk used his education and experience to help design the EMC capabilities of the A-6B, EA-6B, E-2B/C, F-14, and EF‑11 aircraft. Harold also performed EMC engineering experiments that led to advancements in the design of shielded structures, including protecting electronics in all-composite aircraft from lightning effects.
Fred Nichols
Fred Nichols was the speaker at the Third Conference on Radio Frequency Interference Reduction sponsored by the Armour Research Foundation and held in Chicago in 1957, where he suggested starting a National Professional Group on RFI. At the time, he was Vice‑Chair of the Radio Interference Technical Committee, an engineering group in the Los Angeles area that met on an irregular basis to discuss radio frequency interference issues. His talk at the Chicago Conference inspired U.S. RFI engineers to start a petition that resulted in the formation of the Professional Group on RFI as part of the Institute of Radio Engineers.
Over the years, Nichols served the EMC Society in many roles, including serving as President of the EMC Society in 1969. For over 20 years, Nichols was also the “official” photographer for the EMC Society. He gave away pictures to anyone and everyone he captured on film at Symposiums and local IEEE Meetings.
Early in his career, Nichols was president of Genistron, Inc. and was instrumental in evaluating security standards that required the use of shielded rooms. He then left Genistron and started his own company, LectroMagnetic Incorporated (LMI), where he worked on the B-1 bomber as well as many other military programs involving EMC. But perhaps Fred’s greatest living contribution to today’s EMC Society is his daughter, Janet Nichols O’Neil, who has served as the Secretary of the IEEE Society Board of Directors for more than 25 years and is currently serving as the Society’s Vice‑President of Member Services and as the Editor of the EMCS magazine.
James McNaul
McNaul was the first treasurer (1957‑1959) and the second chairman (1959-1960) of the Administrative Committee of the PGRFI and was instrumental in drafting a constitution for the PGRFI. McNaul was a lieutenant in the Army Signal Corps R&D Labs at Fort Monmouth, NJ, from 1956-1958. While at Fort Monmouth, he served as an Assistant Project Officer for Project MONMOUTH, a three-year-long, large-scale investigation of communication systems in a future European war, with particular focus on the potential future impact of RFI on new communication technologies which were then being introduced into the Army’s operational infrastructure.
In 1961, McNaul joined the Army Satellite Communications Agency, becoming Assistant Technical Director. In 1964, he returned to school at Stanford University and earned his Ph.D. in business, and then pursued a career in academia and business until his retirement in 1999. McNaul was one of the founding members who attended the celebration of the 50th Anniversary of the EMC Society in Hawaii in 2007.
Milton Kant
Milton Kant was an original member of the Administrative Committee of the PGRFI and helped prepare a draft Constitution for the PGRFI. He was also the first editor of the PGRFI Newsletter and published the first issue in January 1958. He then served on the Newsletter Committee of the PGRFI. In 1961, Milton served as secretary of the Administrative Committee of the PGRFI and then served as chairman of the Information Retrieval Committee (which led to the publication of EMCABS) before chairing the 1965 IEEE EMC Symposium Committee.
Initially, Kant worked for the Civil Aeronautics Administration and then the U.S. Air Force at the Rome Air Development Center. He became more involved with RFI when he moved to the Sperry Gyroscope Company in New York and then switched to RCA/GE to work on the Aegis destroyer radar system. Kant retired after working on the Aegis system for 22 years and was one of the founding members who attended the celebration of the 50th Anniversary of the EMC Society in 2007.
Ralph Showers
Ralph Showers was a Professor at the Moore School of Electrical Engineering at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia, He was a member of the original Administrative Committee of the PGRFI and served as the third chairman of the PGRFI from 1960 to 1961. Dr. Showers also chaired the Technical Papers Committee, initiating the Transactions of the PGRFI.
In addition to his contribution in the formation of what is today’s EMC Society, Dr. Showers also chaired the United States Committee on EMC (ANSI C63), for 33 years from 1973 to 2005, and also served as chair of the International Special Committee on EMC, CISPR. He remained active in CISPR Technical Advisory Groups on Emission and IEC Technical Committee 77 Technical Advisory Groups on immunity until his death in 2013.
Dr. Showers won numerous awards for his EMC standards activities, including the prestigious International Electrotechnical Commission’s Charles Proteus Steinmetz Award in 1982 “for leadership in the development of standards for measurement of radio frequency interference.” And Dr. Showers was one of the founding members of the EMC Society who attended the 2007 50th Anniversary celebration in Hawaii.
Anthony Zimbalatti
Anthony Zimbalatti was one of the six “drivers” of the organizational founding of the PGRFI and was present at the February 1957 luncheon where it all began. Zimbalatti was a member of the Newsletter Committee of the PGRFI in 1958 and, for many years, wrote a thought-provoking column for the newsletter “Point and Counter Point.” He enjoyed a very successful career as an EMC engineer at the Grumman Aircraft Company and was one of the founding members of the EMC Society who attended the 50th anniversary celebration in 2007.
Vince Mancino
Vince Mancino was an early signer of the petition to form the Professional Group on Radio Frequency Interference (PGRFI) and he remained an active group member throughout the 1960s. He graduated from Rutgers University in 1951 with a BSEE degree and joined RCA as an Engineering Trainee. In 1960, Mancino transferred to Cornell-Dubilier Electronics in Massachusetts and became their Chief Engineer of the Filter Division. But he returned to RCA after several years at Cornell-Dubilier to work on their development of state-of-the-art weather satellites at a time when weather satellites only took pictures of cloud coverage during daylight hours. Mancino was one of the founding members of today’s EMC Society who attended the 50th Anniversary celebration in 2007.
Sam Burruano
Sam was an original member of the Administrative Committee of the PGRFI and was chair and co-organizer of the first IRE RFI Symposium in 1959. In June 1961, Burruano formed Burruano Associates to provide military and civilian agencies with practical and theoretical consultation in the fields of interference analysis and control. He was one of the six founding members of the EMC Society present at the 50th Anniversary celebration in 2007.
Some EMC Problem-Solving Stories from our Founders
What follows are edited version of “War Stories” shared by some of our founding members at the 50th Anniversary celebration of the EMC Society in 2007.
A Story from Tony Zimbalatti
We did early-flight development testing of the Grumman-built E2A U.S. Naval Aircraft. The range of the low-frequency automatic directional finding (LFADF) system was limited because it was an early development aircraft. Because it had no other low frequency receiver to use for navigation, the range was restricted to less than five miles. This hampered the developmental flights for many months.
It was standard practice to have, for each aircraft, an avionics flight test engineer who reported his observations; one particular flight test engineer reported the failure of the aircraft radio to attain maximum range or sensitivity and claimed it was due to electromagnetic interference (EMI). He claimed, furthermore, that the EMI people didn’t know how to solve the problem. In short, and for whatever reason, he didn’t like EMI engineers; they had done something to him.
Several months after hiring onto Grumman in the late 1960s, I was asked to evaluate the problem and to develop a solution. The flight was scheduled on Christmas (bonus) Day because, in general, it was less than a half a day at work. I appeared at the flight‑ready room, met the avionics engineer and the flight test engineer, and asked, “What now?”
He said, “Harness Up.” I said, “Well, show me how. And what do I do, if we have to use the parachute?” (which is part of the harness, for those who are not familiar). He continued, “You mean you haven’t been to school and been certified to fly?” I replied, “I just started at Grumman a couple months ago, what do I know?”
I noticed that he had a wry smile on his face, like, “It’s an EMI guy, I’m going to get him.” So, he harnessed me up, and we walked to the taxi strip where the plane was waiting with the pilot and the co-pilot.
He said, “This is how you use this. If we have to ditch (that’s the technical term for getting out of the aircraft), stand on a seat, push out the plug, jump, count to ten, and you’ll clear everything. Also, we’ll be over water, so you’re going to have to get rid of that harness.” I started to feel queasy.
The way the set-up is on an E2 aircraft is that you have a pilot and co-pilot, you have a left and a right engine, and then in the aft compartment you have three operators with three scopes. The capacity was such that they could monitor the whole East Coast corridor and control all the traffic at Philadelphia, New York, and Washington. We actually ran an experiment with that aircraft to show that we could do that in case the three terminals were down. That is the capability of that aircraft; the equivalent of the Boeing aircraft that did the same thing for the Air Force. The Boeing did it with maybe ten or twelve people, while the Navy did it with three.
We took off successfully. I performed my test and was satisfied with the results that I got. Then, the pilot announced that, since we had time, he wanted to do a so-called “fish-tail experiment.” As in “fishtailing” with a car, the aircraft swings from side to side. He wanted me to observe and report. I was in the rearmost seat of this 60-foot long airplane, feeling most uncomfortable. He was going to measure fishtailing!!
Stopping the engine on the right side, or stopping the propeller and feathering it (which turns it so it doesn’t offer resistance), then replicating the procedure on the left side causes the plane to swing from side to side. I was watching the engine and starting to feel queasy. I don’t like flying in the first place, and, with my inner-ear problems, balance is a big problem for me.
Fortunately, we didn’t have to ditch. To this day, I still don’t know if I would have gone down with the plane because I don’t think I would have jumped. We came back and went into the debriefing room. I debriefed and said that my test proved it wasn’t an EMI problem; it was an antenna problem. The flight test engineer grabbed the microphone, and he said that the test proved that it was an EMC problem. We were back to zero again!
The controversy persisted until a special flight test was made. I got a call from the chief test pilot for the E2 program. He said, “You still have the controversy?”
I said, “Yes, but Tommy, there is really no controversy. If you fly that aircraft with a dummy rigged antenna, we can prove it.”
Now, Tommy was known for a secret. And what was his secret? In one of his maneuvers of the airplane, he dived, fired his gun, came back up into the gun, and riddled his own airplane with bullets. That was the kind of guy Tommy was!
He said, “Tony, if you tell me you want me to fly a dummy-rigged antenna, what are you going to do?” I said, “I am going to move the antenna out of the fuselage (outside of the aircraft) and drop it about six inches. Then we are going to fly.”
He said, “It will be done in two days. The flight will happen Saturday. Want to come in and watch it?” I said, “Of course!”
So, Saturday comes, and Tommy took off. We were watching him. He went out five miles. He went out ten miles. He continued flying and, finally, we got a message.
He says, “I am at a hundred and ten miles.” I’m going, “Tommy, we’ve got the flight restriction.”
He said, “Don’t tell me, that’s my business to fly.” I said, “Sorry.”
So he went out one hundred and ten miles, which was well beyond the range that we needed to do our developmental flight testing. He came back and landed. You have to understand that at the Grumman Company at this time, the founders were there. The original aircraft people, including Leroy Grumman, were still alive. It was an engineering company. It was a company that had more engineers per worker than any other company in the US. In fact, its name was the Grumman Aircraft Engineering Company.
So Tommy says, “If anybody tries to take that antenna off, I will exercise my prerogative.”
Everybody knew what that meant. He had a direct line to call the CEO. So, the flight test continued with a jury-rigged antenna.
Meanwhile, the antenna group and the avionics engineers were still arguing that it was not an antenna problem. Their basis was that I had moved the antenna away from the interference source by bringing it outside the airplane. I said, “Yes.”
Meanwhile, I developed a test plan for the E2 for the EMC engineers that were assigned to the E2 because I was hired to work on another airplane. My section chief told me to write the plan.
I said, “I want you to collect the data to prove that it is an antenna problem.”
They performed their test, basically dropping the antenna one inch at a time. I had math models to predict what would happen on the back of an envelope. You have an aperture, a small aperture, and a large surface. Rensselaer published some aperture results, and I used their quasi-static equations because we were dealing with 95KC to 1 MC (95 kHz to 1 MHz) – not a big deal. They came back with the results, and still, they insisted that it was the antenna. In the hierarchy, the antenna group, for some reason, is considered in high esteem. The reason, I think, is because everyone looks at it as a mysterious device. But it’s nothing but a hunk of wire that gets tuned!
Meanwhile, nobody wanted to do anything. So, I grabbed the antenna installation manual that Collins had written. It said that the average aperture (I can’t remember the exact dimension) was two feet square; the actual aperture was less than that, maybe one-foot square. I looked to the antenna engineer, and I said, “How did this happen?”
He said, “You know … structures. We are always concerned about cutting a big wall at that location on the aircraft.” I said, “Yeah. I can understand that. So, what did you do?”
He said, “I called Collins and told him about the problem.” Collins said: “Oh yeah, you could reduce the size of the aperture.”
I said, “You have this documented, of course. And did you ask him for the mathematics to justify this decision?” I knew the answer by his reaction. I said, “You’ve done a very poor thing.” I showed him the results because my boss had seen them.
He said, “I certainly endorse it. I don’t want to be in an argument with this section chief.”
I said, “He doesn’t have to know.”
So, to this day, that antenna sits two inches below the fuselage, forty or fifty years later.
A Story from Vince Mancino
When directly overhead, the satellite transmitted the data directly to a ground station in the local area. But, when the satellite was beyond the horizon, it would record the data on a tape recorder and then transmit it to Earth from the tape recorder with a more powerful data transmitter.
RCA Astro-Electronics Division had built a weather satellite for the U. S. Air Force and it was undergoing final simulation tests. This required the recording of weather data on the tape recorder and then playing it back to the transmitter, which would simulate transmission to an earth ground station.
Well, each time the data transmitter was turned on, the tape recorder output was turned to unintelligible gibberish. RCA had a high-powered managerial team frantically trying to solve the problem because there were schedule constraints and they were not making any progress.
And then, someone remembered that I had previous EMC expertise. With the help of a mechanical design engineer assigned to me at my insistence, we designed an add-on external box with compartments that could be attached to the tape recorder. This was feasible because the tape recorder was located within a sealed housing. All wiring entering or exiting the tape recorder had to pass through this “add-on external box.” This permitted (and required) signal lines to be isolated from the command and control lines, and then both groups to be isolated from the power lines.
It also required miniature radio frequency (RF) suppression feed-through capacitors to be mounted inside the box on the outside wall away from the wall mating with the tape recorder. All tape recorder external wiring had to pass through the filtering devices inside this add-on box. This approach worked, and the successful test of the “RF-fix” was both dramatic and emotional.
The rules and principles that I laid down on this weather satellite became standard operating procedures for many years on all RCA-built weather satellites, as well as other satellites. In February 1967, I received an RCA Engineering Excellence Achievement Award for the satellite design “RF-fix.”
A Story from Sam Burruano
What I want to do is tell you a little bit about the early days, some of my war stories. The technical stuff is great, but there are a lot of work stories to show you that EMC can be a fun job.
My first run-in with Air Force One was in the 1950s. Eisenhower was president, and Vice-President Nixon was on his way to Russia for the infamous Kitchen Debate. As Air Force One was flying over Poland, the navigation was via triangulation, and something was jamming the entire navigation system. They couldn’t hear any of the transmissions from the radio stations and required special help from the Russians to get into Russia.
When the plane came back from Russia, they called and said: “We want to borrow Sam for three nights.” They thought it was going to take that long to find out what the problem was. So, I went over to Wright-Patterson Air Force Base. They must have had about 15 or 20 guys out there making microscopic measurements on the body of the airplane.
I went up to the Colonel who was running the thing and said, “Look, send these guys home. I’ll solve the problem for you.” You pray a lot when you do this because that’s gutsy. So, I sat down and started to do the logical things. What could be causing this? Is it on the airplane? What could it be? Could it be broadband or narrowband continuous wave?
Could it be the electronic system or the electrical system? I listed all the parts of the electric system. There was no sense in listing all the electronics sub‑systems; I turned all of those on at once and it didn’t do a thing to the navigational system. So, I started to go through the electrical sub-systems one by one. All of a sudden, BZZZZ!! Boy, I had found it. I looked down to see what it was, and it was the fluorescent lights.
So, it was a very simple solution. I got some non‑fluorescent lamps and installed one interference filter, and the interference was gone. They thought I was a real hero. (I know, I know… a hero is really an Italian sandwich!)
Conclusion
The 50th Anniversary of the EMC Society provided a unique opportunity for young EMC engineers to meet with the six founders who were present at the 2007 IEEE International EMC Symposium. Many of the EMCS members took advantage of that opportunity throughout that year’s Symposium, which ended with a special Awards ceremony during which each founder was awarded an IEEE Electromagnetic Compatibility Hall of Fame Award. It was an honor and a privilege to associate with the six honorees in Hawaii and in the years that followed before the last pioneer, Milton Kant, passed away in 2023. Each of our founders left an important legacy, as well as some fascinating EMC stories!!!
