Wilson, David Gordon 1928-

PERSONAL:

Born February 11, 1928, in Sutton Cold-field, Warwickshire, England; naturalized U.S. citizen, 1972; son of William (an electrical engineer) and Florence Ida (a music teacher and homemaker) Wilson; married Anne Sears, July 15, 1963 (divorced, 1987); married Ellen Cecilia Warner (a physical therapist), December 30, 1988; children: John M.B., Erica Sears Wilson Mandau, Susan Speck. Education: University of Birmingham, B.Sc. (with first-class honors), 1948; University of Nottingham, Ph.D., 1953. Politics: "Radical." Hobbies and other interests: Human-powered vehicles, hiking, tennis, music, policy studies.

ADDRESSES:

Home—Winchester, MA. Office—Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Room 7-040, 77 Massachusetts Ave., Cambridge, MA 02139; fax: 617-253-3484; Wilson TurboPower Inc., 55 6th Rd., Woburn, MA 01801. E-mail—[email protected]; [email protected].

CAREER:

Brush Electrical Engineering Co. Ltd., Loughborough, England, apprentice, 1948-50; Donaldson Line, Glasgow, Scotland, ship's engineer officer, 1953; Brush Electrical Engineering Co. Ltd., gas turbine engineer, 1953-55; Boeing Airplane Co., visiting gas turbine engineer, 1956-57; Ruston & Hornsby, Lincoln, England, senior gas turbine engine designer, 1957-58; University of Ibadan, Zaria Campus, Zaria, Nigeria, senior lecturer in mechanical engineering, 1958-60; Northern Research and Engineering Corp., London, vice president and technical director of U.S. office in Massachusetts, 1960-66; Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, associate professor, 1966-71, professor of mechanical engineering, 1971-94, interim director of Office of Minority Education, 1994-95. Wilson TurboPower, Inc., cofounder, 2001, president and chief technology officer. Member of local, state, and national commissions for U.S. Office of Science and Technology, National Academy of Sciences, and Commonwealth of Massachusetts; consultant to General Electric Co., Department of Defense, Battelle Pacific Northwest Laboratories, and Abiomed, Inc.

MEMBER:

American Society of Mechanical Engineers, American Society for Engineering Education, Society for the History of Technology, Institution of Mechanical Engineers (Britain), Common Cause (past state board chair).

AWARDS, HONORS:

Institution of Mechanical Engineers, T. Bernard Hall Prize, 1954, for a research paper, Lord Weir First Prize, 1955, for a graduate paper; Commonwealth Fund fellow at Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Harvard University, 1955-57; Reclamation Industries International Prize, 1974, for a pilot sorting system; Erskine fellow at University of Canterbury, 1993.

WRITINGS:

(Editor) The Treatment and Management of Urban Solid Waste, Technomic (Westport, CT), 1972.

Bicycling Science, MIT Press (Cambridge, MA), 1974, 3rd edition, 2004.

(Editor) Solid-Waste-Management Handbook, Van Nostrand Reinhold (New York, NY), 1977.

(With Richard Wilson and others) The Health Effects of Fossil-Fuel Burning, Ballinger (Pensacola, FL), 1981.

The Design of High-Efficiency Turbomachinery and Gas Turbines, MIT Press (Cambridge, MA), 1984, 2nd edition (with T.P. Korakianitis), Prentice-Hall (Upper Saddle River, NJ), 1998.

The Design of Gas-Turbine Engines, International Gas Turbine Institute (Atlanta, GA), 1991.

(Editor, with Allan V. Abbott) Human-Powered Vehicles, Human Kinetic Publishers (Champaign, IL), 1995.

(With D.S. Beck) Gas-Turbine Regenerators, Chapman & Hall (New York, NY), 1996.

SIDELIGHTS:

David Gordon Wilson told CA: "Most of my technical books were written because people, including publishers, asked me to do so. Bicycling Science started with an earnest request from Frank Whitt after he entered a bicycle-design competition. I wrote my books on turbine design because every existing book I specified for my classes went out of print—and, of course, because I knew that I could do better. I'm writing my memoirs because my parents didn't leave much about their interesting lives, because I have had a varied and unusual life, and because I like the bully-pulpit aspect that enables me to preach on how I believe politics and policies must change."

BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL SOURCES:

PERIODICALS

Mechanical Engineering-CIME, March, 2005, review of Bicycling Science, 3rd edition, p. 59.

Science News, April 10, 2004, review of Bicycling Science, p. 239.

ONLINE

Massachusetts Institute of Technology Web site: David Gordon Wilson Home Page,http://www-me.mit.edu/people/personal/dgwilson/htm (April 19, 2006).