Edgineering

As the University celebrates the inventiveness of engineering this fall, a note on the brilliant effervescent relentless cheerful curiosity of inventor Ed Sweo ’56.

By Camela Raymond

In the course of his long and curious life, Ed Sweo has designed and sold motor controls and drives for a four-story-high, 200-foot-long machine tool General Motors once commissioned to stamp out entire car bodies from single sheets of metal (it didn’t catch on); for moveable fins on an experimental boat specially designed to accommodate an offshore gambling enterprise; for numerous steerable parabolic satellite antennas, one of which belonged to the King of Morocco; for machines that have produced laminated paper and sheets of Styrofoam-like material; for elevator systems; for radar devices; and for all sorts of other humming, groaning, rumbling hulks of industrial machinery that fuel the economy in more or less invisible but important ways. His talents have been sought all over the world; in the field of electrical engineering, he’s “as innovative as anyone I have ever met,” says University engineering dean Zia Yamayee, who has admired Sweo for sixteen years. Yet despite his technical wizardry, Sweo admits cheerfully that people generally aren’t interested in the technical aspects of what he does. It’s much easier for most people — even fellow engineers, I notice — to praise his charm and generosity than it is to savor his masterful interpretations of Ohm’s Law.

There are reasons for this. One is that most of us are technologically illiterate; no matter how we fetishize the end-user experience of our smart phones and hybrid cars, we have become accustomed to not knowing, and not caring, how the technologies we depend on for daily survival and comfort actually work. Another is that our culture has entered a perverse state of denial about its continuing dependence on exactly what Ed Sweo specializes in designing, heavy equipment; some combination of exuberance about the rise of the so-called “information economy” and embarrassment over how the physical stuff in our lives actually gets made (cut to images of overseas sweatshops and coal-gobbling generators) seems to have spawned an absurd collective fantasy that the industrial infrastructure that builds our homes and cars and airplanes and fills store shelves is obsolete. And maybe the biggest reason it’s hard to fully appreciate Sweo’s contributions to the technological universe is that basic, unavoidable condition of modern technological labor, specialization. Like most engineers, Sweo hasn’t simply designed unsexy machines, he’s designed parts of unsexy machines, an incremental achievement we haven’t yet learned to glorify. Sweo himself likes to relate the parable of the three bricklayers, which goes something like this: Asked what he’s doing, the first bricklayer says he’s laying bricks. The second bricklayer says he’s feeding his family. The third bricklayer gazes into the distance, beams, and exclaims, “I’m building a cathedral!”
Ed Sweo is the third guy. Think of it this way: his motor-control systems connect to motors, to software applications, to energy supply systems; his elevator cars and satellite dishes support office buildings and telecommunications systems; these structures in turn support innumerable industries, countless lives. Ed Sweo’s bricks bear enough of a load that should any come loose, the whole world would feel a faint shudder.

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“I have an inherent and enormous curiosity about everything,” Sweo says, “from religion and the existence of God to why teens’ bodies mature before their brains. But I’m more interested in physical life, as opposed to the philosophical. I’m less a philosopher than a tinkerer.”

It started early. Sweo’s father worked for the telephone company in Portland, building central communication offices, which, Sweo recalls, in those days consisted of great big rooms full of noisy relays. Having listened to his father lament the lack of an engineering education that would have advanced his career with the phone company, “it never occurred to me to go without one,” Sweo says. By the time he was a senior at Central Catholic High, he was dreaming of MIT, but the family was strapped for cash, so Ed’s choices were Lewis and Clark College (“ludicrously costly, we thought”), Reed College (“reputed to be nutty”), and the University of Portland (“the obvious choice, for a Catholic kid.”). The University also awarded a single annual academic scholarship to a graduating senior Central Catholic, and in 1952, “incredibly, at least to me,” it went to Ed Sweo.

With a grin he says he proved the value of a well-rounded liberal arts education on The Bluff, since it was in a logic and epistemology class that he met his wife, Sharon Smith — they were immediately smitten, and married in 1956 — but he also did well enough in electrical engineering to head right to Stanford for a master’s degree, during a boom time for engineering world-wide. The transistor had been invented a few years earlier, the world’s first computers were swiftly gaining power and losing bulk, Sputnik was launched in 1957, and the integrated circuit, the basis of modern microprocessing, appeared in 1958.

By then, Sweo was finishing his grad degree at night and working fulltime as a controls engineer for Dalmo Victor Company, a Bay Area producer of airborne radar and precision hydraulic controls. He started his own consulting firm in 1964, aiming initially at designing and manufacturing electronic controls for heavy equipment — in engineering-speak, “precision and regenerative DC motor controls in the 5-200 HP range.” Since the Japanese had the small-electronics market more or less locked up, Sweo Engineering figured big machine tools “were our meat,” Sweo says, “because the Japanese couldn’t build anything big enough, and to do one or two of something was not feasible for them. It was feasible for us, though.”

Ed Burnell, a fellow Dalmo Victor engineer who joined Sweo’s outfit and became a longtime collaborator, says that Sweo “was very, very good at solving technical problems. He could run circles around the rest of us.” Conversely, Burnell was the guy Sweo depended on to take his ideas and make them real. Unfortunately, the sales end of the business came naturally to neither of them. “So we ended up selling ourselves,” Sweo says, “probably just in time to avoid going bankrupt.” The new parent company, Randtron, renamed the business Randtronics and made Sweo an executive vice president. Sweo worked there for four years, expanding the company’s DC drive division, during which time Burnell left to join the Jet Propulsion Lab in Pasadena.

Then, in 1974, Sweo made what he looks back on as “one of the smartest things I ever did”: he and Sharon sold their house in Palo Alto, packed up their belongings, and “took our kiddies and left town.” For four months, the couple, with their two daughters, aged 14 and 11, and their 5-year-old son, traveled through Asia. Home base for the first month was the Bangkok Christian Guesthouse, an enclave for Baptist missionaries. In the mornings, the girls attended a grade school run by nuns, helping local kids learn English in exchange for Thai lessons; afternoons were spent sightseeing. The family journeyed on to Malaysia, Singapore, and Indonesia, hopped a freighter to Borneo, and returned home by way of Japan and Alaska. Sweo credits the experience with helping shape his children into “capable and self-reliant” adults.

Back stateside, the family relocated to the Pacific Northwest to be nearer to Sharon’s ailing mother; the move also enabled Sweo to make a clean break with Randtronics. “I realized finally I wasn’t a company guy,” Sweo says. “I was a starter, and I was pretty good at it.” He started his second solo firm, Sweo Controls, initially as a sales firm representing other drive manufacturers. But by 1980 Sweo was drifting back into design. Now wiser to the marketing side of things, Sweo was soon adding more employees, designing motor-control systems for heavy equipment (things like industrial-grade machine tools and satellite antennas), and relishing the many small jobs that rolled in. But with a half-dozen employees on the payroll and three kids to send through college Sweo was ready for a big contract from a big company. A company like Fadal.

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Fadal (the letters stood for Frank, Adrian, Dave, and Larry, the names of the Russian owner and his three sons) had developed a metal-milling machine that parts makers were lining up to buy. Capable of precision-slicing through lightweight materials like aluminum faster and more efficiently than standard machines designed for cutting steel, Fadal’s product was emerging as a champion in just the market Ed Sweo was courting: industrial customers whose equipment needs were, essentially, too small and varied for larger companies to bother with, but suited well to scrappy outfits like his. He hoped to supply Frank and sons with a superior motor control for the milling machine’s crucial spindle drive.

A motor control is, simply stated, an electronic system that controls the flow of electricity from a power line to a motor shaft. A control translates informational signals, little low-power bleeps emitted by a machine’s computer-brain, into powerful surges of electrical current that fuel industrial-grade muscle. As a result, the motor speeds up or slow downs at a precisely controlled rate. Brutely mechanistic though they are, motor control systems, designed well, can dramatically enhance the productivity of power-intensive machines and the companies that rely on them. Sweo’s whole business strategy hinged on being the technical wiz who could help companies make those incremental gains, which is how he planned to make Fadal a loyal customer.

But in this rare instance, he’d run up against a wall. His competitor had a lock on what apparently was, according to Sweo’s increasingly harried investigation, the only motor that would hold up under the boundary-straining conditions of Fadal’s fast, powerful, precise milling machine. Without a viable motor, there would be no motor control. Months of dead ends passed until finally, Sweo’s contact at Fadal called. Bad news, he said. He was canceling the order. “I almost cried,” Sweo recalls, a quarter-century later. It was, he says, one of the most disappointing days of his life.

But Sweo didn’t give up. He started thinking how to create an even better motor/controller pairing — a drive — to sell to companies like Fadal. DC motors were standard in the high-horsepower precision machinery that was Sweo’s bread and butter, but these motors had a major weak spot: brushes and commutators that tended to fail at high speeds. (Fadal had skirted this problem by using a different technology, a permanent magnet motor, but it was operating at the edge of its capacity.) The other option was an AC motor, which had no brushes and commutators, but had its own drawbacks. But there was one sort of AC motor that might work, thought Sweo — a vector-drive motor that hadn’t been implemented in industrial machinery in a cost-effective way, but just might, with the help of recent advances in computer-chip technology. Sweo went to work knitting the pieces of his idea together. A vector-drive motor, some advanced computerized controls, and, for ease of operation, an innovative auto-adjusting feature. After more than a year of development, the final product emerged: a general-purpose drive that was, just as Sweo had hoped, more reliable and cost-effective than anything then on the market.

The Sweo drive, enthusiastic customers, including Fadal, called it. Orders for the drive, and for Sweo’s other design services and ideas, flowed in, and profits soared. In 1990, with 65 employees and more contracts than he any longer cared to oversee, Sweo sold his company to Baldor Electric, a fast-growing manufacturer of industrial motors, and became head of Baldor’s drives team. Five years later, the drives division was grossing $25 million per year, Baldor was one of the largest motor and drive suppliers in the country, and Sweo was, if not a rich man, then comfortable enough to pursue a new phase of a vocation that he defines, simply, as “making things better.”

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It’s early summer 2009, and Ed Sweo is walking me through Shiley Hall, home of the University’s School of Engineering. Thumping and buzzing sounds fill the halls as workers go about transforming the vintage 1948 building, formerly known as Engineering Hall, into a gleaming new state-of-the-art facility. Less a renovation than a startling renaissance, the $20 million effort will double the size of the building by opening a new west wing facing the river, add new classrooms and labs, and bring learning technology into the 21st century. It will also signal the culmination of a dream Sweo has helped champion for a decade: creating an engineering program equipped to compete with the best in the country.

The renovation would never have come to fruition without a record-breaking $12 million donation from Sweo’s fellow inventor and entrepreneur, Donald Shiley ’51 and his wife Darlene. But it was Ed and Sharon Sweo who planted the first seed with a 1999 capital-campaign gift ($1 million that’s since grown to $3.5 million) which reflects the couple’s steadfast commitment to give back to the university where they fell in love, where Sweo discovered his talent for engineering, and where, Sweo says, “everything became possible.”

Since retiring from Baldor and joining the University’s Board of Regents in 1995, Sweo has been a tireless advocate for the vision of engineering dean Zia Yamayee, who arrived in 1996. Sweo’s steady encouragement and well-timed gifts helped Yamayee streamline the curriculum, add an environmental engineering track, establish the Edwin and Sharon Sweo Endowed Chair in Engineering (held by environmental engineer Jim Male), and savor steady increases in enrollment, national exam passing rates, and fundraising. “There are no more excuses, are there?” Sweo says of the resulting wholesale reinvention of the engineering program.

His friends on The Bluff point out that Sweo has contributed far more than financial largesse, and they use words like humble, patient, calm, undemanding, endlessly supportive, team player... “Cheerleader, instigator,” says Sweo. “My role, at this stage, is to encourage those with deeper pockets to do more than I can do.” And, it seems, to relentlessly prod towards something better. Which means that now, as construction crews hurtle toward the formal opening and dedication of the renovated hall, Sweo is already looking for the next challenge. “Once you’ve got to where you can see it’s going to get done,” he says, “that’s probably the pinnacle...it’s more about the chase than getting to the goal...”

That chase continues for Sweo in electrical engineering: — when he’s not attending regents’ meetings and sailing along the coasts of America, he tinkers with an innovative motor-control system he describes as “brushless doubly-fed machines and sensorless controls” — in lay terms, technology that may someday make certain sorts of heavy equipment, like wind turbines, more efficient. Though he has filed patents, and hopes to license the technology at some point, he’s really doing it for the thrill of the chase. “I just want to keep digging,” he says. “Curiosity leads me to keep pursuing things until I can put the pieces together. Many things in life are by no means obvious on the surface. It’s like you pull up a little corner, and that allows you to see a little further. It just seems to be the way of things...”

Portland writer Camela Raymond was an editor at Portland Monthly and founder and editor of the Northwest culture magazine The Organ. For more of her work see camelaraymond.com.