Emerson W. Pugh, 1989 IEEE president, died on 8 December at the age of 95.
The IEEE Fellow served as president of the IEEE Foundation from 2000 to 2004.
“Emerson Pugh was one of the very first IEEE volunteers I met when I joined the IEEE staff in 1997,” says Karen Galuchie, IEEE Foundation executive director. “I will be forever grateful to Emerson for the lessons he taught me, the passion with which he shared his time and talent with IEEE, and the role he played in creating the IEEE Foundation we know today.”
Pugh was an active member of the IEEE History Committee, serving as its chair in 1997. In 2009 he worked with the IEEE History Center to create the IEEE STARS (Significant Technological Achievement Recognition Selections) program, an online compendium of invited, peer-reviewed articles on the history of major developments in electrical and computer science and technology. The articles have been incorporated into the Engineering and Technology History Wiki.
“Emerson Pugh was the most influential volunteer during my more than 27-year tenure (so far),” says Michael Geselowitz, senior director of the IEEE History Center. “He was able to combine his three passions—engineering, IEEE, and history—by joining the IEEE History Committee.”
Pugh worked for 35 years at IBM, where he developed a number of memory technologies for early computer systems.
Innovative work at IBM
He received bachelor’s and doctoral degrees in physics from Carnegie Tech (now Carnegie Mellon) in 1951 and 1956. Following graduation, he joined the school as an assistant professor of physics. After a year of teaching, he left to join IBM, in Poughkeepsie, N.Y., as a researcher in the metal physics group. In 1958 he was promoted to manager of the group.
Pugh was a visiting scientist in 1961 and 1962 at IBM’s Zurich laboratory before relocating to the company’s Watson Research Center, in Yorktown Heights, N.Y. There he led the development of a thin magnetic film memory array used in the IBM System/360, a family of mainframe computer systems that debuted in 1964.
In 1965 he was named director of IBM’s operational memory group. Later he served as director of technical planning for the company’s research division. He also was a consultant to IBM’s research director.
He took a leave of absence in 1974 to lead a study by the U.S. National Academy of Sciences on motor vehicle emissions and fuel economy. He returned to the company the following year to research memory technologies. He developed bubble memory, a type of nonvolatile computer memory that uses a thin film of a magnetic material to hold small magnetized areas known as bubbles or domains. Each domain stores one bit of data, the smallest unit of digital information.
Beginning in the early 1980s, Pugh worked on IBM’s technical history project, authoring or coauthoring four books on the company and its technical developments.
He retired in 1993.
Decades of service
Pugh joined IEEE in the mid-1960s and was an active volunteer.
He served as 1973 president of the IEEE Magnetics Society. He was the editor of IEEE Transactions on Magnetics in 1968.
He was Division IV director and vice president of IEEE Technical Activities.
In 1989 he was elected IEEE president. During his term, he oversaw revisions to the IEEE Code of Ethics and the opening of the IEEE Operations Center, in Piscataway, N.J.
The IEEE History Center in 2019 established the Pugh Young Scholar in Residence internship, named after him and his wife, Elizabeth. Students studying the history of technology or engineering can become a research fellow at the center and receive a stipend of US $5,000.
Pugh was active in several other organizations. He served on the United Engineering board of trustees, for example, and he was a Fellow of the American Physical Society.
Among his recognitions were a 1992 IEEE-USA literary award, the 1991 IEEE Magnetics Society Achievement Award, and a 1990 Carnegie Mellon Alumni Association achievement award.