Draft dated sun22dec02, 9pm
23dec02.
EMC – A Fatally Flawed DisciplineMy attendance at an IEE Open Discussion Forum on the
teaching of electromagnetics in undergraduates course on 12 December 2002
encourages me to confront the EMC incubus.
I have been very concerned about the EMC community since 1964, when I first ran into it in Los Angeles when I designed a power supply for a torpedo-proof line printer for the US Navy in Data Products Corp. I became extremely concerned when in Europe it became a criminal offence to fail to take a piece of equipment through their ridiculous EMC tests. Of all the subcultures in electronic engineering, EMC is the worst. During the Falklands War, HMS Sheffield had to switch off its radar looking for incoming missiles in order to resume radio communication. This is why it did not see incoming Exocet missiles, and you know the rest. How was it that after decades of pouring money into the EMC community, this could happen? Do the EMC community agree that they should shoulder the blame? No. This is because that community has gone into limbo, sucking in money but evading the real compatibility problems, like watching for missiles while you talk to HQ. It remains illegal to switch on your laptop computer in an aeroplane, or to use your mobile phone. It is illegal to use a mobile telephone in the forecourt of a petrol station. While visiting the EMC magicians in Ford Motor Company, I found that it was illegal to have a car radio which inadvertently affected an overtaking car’s electronically controlled brakes. However, the EMC community is totally indifferent if, switching on your car’s starter motor, you cause a passing motorist’s brakes to lock suddenly. My EMC experience in England started with NWS3, a British copy of US test specs. It is fatally flawed at the fundamental theoretical level. These flaws remained during further decades because of the lack of grasp of the fundamentals of electromagnetism by the whole EMC community. Los Angeles
I first came across the EMC community as a design engineer in Data Products Corporation, Los Angeles, in 1964. See my book “The Catt Concept” pub. Hart-Davis 1972 for insight into how my family, our furniture and I were shipped to Los Angeles by Ampex Corp.; how I was fired seven months later, and hired on the following Monday by the Ampex spinoff company Data Products Corp. down the road for 50% more salary. In Data Products, I was put to design a power supply for a torpedo-proof line printer for use on board ship in the US Navy. I discuss it in my 1973 book “Computer Worship” pub. Pitman. (The 12dec02 evening lecturer shipped over by the IEE from the USA came from the US Navy EMC community.) We had to meet EMC requirements, so we hired an EMC magician for six months from the company whose name I remember as Geniston. He came and sat in our offices. Immediately I went to him and asked his about the EMC criteria he relied on. He would not give me any technical information. He said that I should just carry on designing and building the prototype as before. After it was completed he would add a few grilles and things. We did as he suggested, and on completion we sent it for EMC testing to a test company - Geniston. We were wise to choose Geniston, because this ensured that it would pass. I was mystified by all of this until I heard rumours that U.S Navy admirals had large holdings of stock in Geniston. Then it all made sense. The EMC regulations prescribed that electric power drawn by the line printer must not vary at a greater rate than 3Hz. This meant that if the line printer suddenly had to print a whole row of 200 As AAAAAAAAAAAA (requiring 720 amps) the amount of power demanded down the mains cable from somewhere else on the ship must not increase in a detectable way, at a greater rate than that indicated by the figure of 3Hz. This was because in principle the EMC test magicians would put a current probe around one of the wires, Live of Neutral, bringing in power (The idea was obviously that there might be a Russian spy with a current probe on the US Navy ship, and he might be able to detect whether the line printer was printing information. We all know that increased communication would indicate that the US was about to attack his brother on a nearby Russian ship). The machine sounded like a machine gun, but obviously all Russian spies were deaf, or at least all those who served in the US Navy, so the audio pandemonium was not a matter of concern for our freedom-loving democracy. My solution to the “problem” was to take in constant power, and build a shunt regulating power supply instead of the usual series regulating power supply. That is, whenever the line printer was not printing at maximum rate, I would divert all the unused power into an electric fire. This design was much admired for its novelty, and the prototype worked fine. It was appreciated most on cold mornings. I was moved on to design work on a disc memory destined for the Manchester University Atlas super-computer (which I had just emigrated from designing), and another bright young replacement was hired in to design a conventional printer power supply for the line printer which ignored the EMC specs. Presumably it was thought that a better solution would be to deny current probes to resident Russian spies in the US Navy. Our line printer was the most advanced and sophisticated. Each of the 120 hammers had a row of one inch square coils attached to it (in a permanent magnetic field) through which a 6 amp current would be delivered for 2msec. Thus, printing a row of As meant a 6 amp pulse suddenly (perhaps with a rise time of one microsecond) flowing in each of 120 coils for 2 msec. The number of turns in each coil is now unknown (although my notes indicate 3mH), but my records tell me the rest. The DC resistance of the coil was 10 ohms, which indicates that the number of turns was large, as it would be. During the EMC testing, Geniston would bring up the most sensitive antenna to two feet from the end of this gigantic electromagnet, to try to detect electromagnetic (but to ignore sonic) activity. Their resident magician would then propose blocking metal grilles and the like to blind the antenna, but on no account would he get inside our line printer and discuss our circuits and layout, with a view to causing mutual cancellation of magnetic fields. It appears that this madness continues to this day, and EMC magicians continue to stay outside each of the possibly incompatible boxes, brewing up their million pound Faraday cage test rooms and billions of nonsensical mathematical equations. The 720 amps was delivered by a gigantic resident 60v electrolytic in the line printer, about one foot cube in volume. At that time, electrolytics exploded at –60 degrees F. Naval requirements were that on board items must survive down to –65 degrees F. Obviously, the US navy operated in very cold waters. It was frustrating to know that the USAF only required that their equipment survive down to –50 degrees F. This problem (how to print the message that the sea was frozen solid) was not solved by the time I was fired. EMC was not the only ruse to increase costs in the defence of freedom and democracy. The printer had to survive 200g. This test involved strapping the equipment to a 4,000 pound anvil, and then hitting the anvil with a 3,000 pound hammer which had been raised through one foot and then left to swing at the anvil like a pendulum. Presumably nervous designers would pray for a fly, or better still a wasp, to intervene. Interestingly, all the seamen aboard would have had their legs broken, but the printer would continue to print a message (“Torpedo hit”). The demonstration film, where I saw a nice piece of electronic equipment turn into an array of projectiles, was taken seriously by the freedom-loving Americans watching with me. They objected to my laughter, although I was only fired many months later. We have to
realise that had the resident Geniston EMC magician ventured inside out
equipment, or even entered into technical discussions with me, he would
probably have been betrayed as part of “rent-a-crowd”, similarly to the way
Weinstock’s GEC would rent a crowd of milkmen and the like for a weapons
project to keep his roster of “electronic engineers” up to the two thirds
contractual minimum. This minimum roster saved the government funded project
from cancellation. (In any case, at 100% of cost plus 14%, the more milkmen
he hired as engineers, the more would be GEC profits. Professor “stinking
fish” Brown played his part in this when he betrayed the IEE, who were trying
to establish a way to distinguish between an electronic engineer and a
milkman.) In both cases, the Official Secrets Act or the like would provide
ample cover. Even at this late stage, this article is probably undermining
this country’s defences, which are based on bluff and scam, see http://www.electromagnetism.demon.co.uk/gamoe.htm . The EMC community fits well into such a
scene. The EMC requirements meant that the little 3 foot long Data Products line printer turned into something looking very much like a tank, as can be seen in Data Products product brochures of the time. Since the antenna used by EMC magicians to detect emitted noise was brought up to a standard distance from the edge of the device under test, one obvious recourse was to make the device bigger, and so push the EMC detecting antenna away from the workings inside. More recently, I was an electronic engineer at GEC Chaucer House, Portsmouth, but not at the time an EMC magician. The bright young thing designated Portsmouth Tigerfish Torpedo EMC magician talked about buying a screen room (Faraday Cage). He said it would be 100dB. It was interesting that the naïve, long term defence electronics designer sitting behind me argued with him that surely 60dB would suffice. I told him that this was ridiculous. The bright young thing’s future career path required that he buy the £100,000 100dB cage. What the job needed was nothing to do with it. Stingray
[Whenever a major scandal hit GEC, Weinstock would rename it Marconi, or vice versa. MPs were too dim to realise that all the weapons scandals involved the single company. In this document, GEC stands for GEC or Marconi.] Stingray was special. GEC operated a number of “defence” weapon “design” scams, and Stingray was by far the most surreal. http://www.electromagnetism.demon.co.uk/gamoe.htm Davidson, Walton and Catt had made major breakthroughs in electromagnetic theory. We needed to find out how much of our breakthroughs were known in all the electromagnetism subcultures. Two of us were employed at GEC Borehamwood at the time, so Malcolm Davidson went upstairs to the Microwave design department. He came back down to report that they were only plumbers. They knew nothing, and merely played with equations and connected together tubes to pipe around only one mode. Later, the question arose as to whether the EMC community already knew any of our advances. So I stopped teaching remedial English and got a job as the top EMC magician on the Stingray torpedo design project in Stanmore, Middlesex. As a magician myself, I would be able to find out what they knew. (For instance, I might be better able to force them to tell me what their jargon meant.) I had to avoid the EMC experts in GEC Portsmouth, GEC Rochester etc. until I had rumbled what some of their main buzz-words (e.g. lisn) meant, and found out what books they relied on. After a few days I found out that their bible was the £400 Don White manual. However, no other EMC experts would lend me their copy, or let me see it. After about ten days, however, I met a man who sold EMC devices imported from Los Angeles to our weapons industry. He volunteered to lend me the EMC bible, which was one of his products, for two or three weeks. When I asked him why, he said that he had mixed loyalty. On the one hand he was happy take a 10p capacitor manufactured in Los Angeles, renamed an EMC capacitor, sold to him for £2 for him to mark up to £5 and then sell to GEC. On the other hand, he was also a taxpayer, and was appalled by the drain on the taxpayer. At the time, “defence” took 6% of GDP. It took me a day or two to find out that Don White and his EMC cardinals were technically ignorant. I wrote a document blowing the gaff on Don White, which I witheld. By then, I knew that the EMC community knew no electromagnetic theory, much as we had found for the plumbers called “Microwave Engineers”. However, by now I preferred to sit in GEC at £11 per hour rather than sit at home for £0 per hour. I was justified, because the same British government was funding research into my inventions at Middlesex Polytechnic, Brunel University and RSRE Malvern. I was on the research management committees. Everyone else on these committees was so jealous of the fact that my inventions, not theirs, were being funded, that they were determined that anyone else on these projects would be salaried, but not me, the inventor. This was thus a double double-cross. I would sit at my GEC Stingray desk working on the Catt Spiral projects, which paperwork looked more or less the same as Stingray paperwork. I would be paid to do nothing on Stingray, and be paid nothing to work for the same government on Catt Spiral projects. An interesting moral dilemma occurred when I skipped out of “work” on Stingray to attend (unsalaried) a management conference on one of my government-funded projects at Brunel or Middlesex. Should I claim pay for those hours away from my desk at Stanmore? To keep my £11 per hour going, I had to keep away from other EMC magicians on Stingray. However, after two or three weeks the Portsmouth EMC magician could no longer be held off by my excuses. So two days before his proposed visit, I sent him my report rubbishing his Don White bible. Realising the danger to himself, he cancelled, and I never saw him. In the “defence” industry, reality threatens everyone. By then I knew that EMC magicians were ex-RAF airborne radio operators or the like, good troopers who knew little electromagnetic theory. The £400 Don White manual gave them Project Plans which they could copy into their own reports for the MoD. They could also copy technical sections into their reports. All this copying was the reason why nobody except EMC magicians must ever see the Don White bible. While Principal Lecturer in West Herts College, I found out that it was an offence to have no functioning earth leakage detector in the fuse box for power entering a room occupied by students. However, the indispensable mains filters on each machine in my room full of Nascom computers put too much electric current into the earth line. I set out to find out who generated the regulation. After some months, I homed in on an engineer hiding in the entrails of the I.E.E. I told him that that was fine; students’ lives had to be protected. All it meant was that throughout England, computer training would have to be done without using computers. I would make sure that everyone knew his involvement in making it illegal to use computers when teaching computers, so that he would get the credit for saving students’ lives. He replied that the standard was only advisory. Given minimal support, I could do the same with these ridiculous EMC standards, which at present have criminal sanctions against those who breach them. Under pressure, no technocrat will accept accountability for their enforcement. In the past, EMC, spawned in “defence”, would only boost the parasitic activity called “defence”, and help to waste a fraction of the GDP. However, the recent move, where it becomes a criminal offence for commercial industry to avoid their ridiculous, expensive standards and tests, makes them a more serious threat to us all. I need assistance to winkle out technocrats responsible for the present standards, to require them to and defend the test standards, and to be accountable for them. Such people probably do not exist. If they do, we must begin to destroy the credibility of such individuals, and in the end make these ridiculous standards unviable in a criminal court, because a jury will refuse to convict. Ivor Catt 13dec02; 29dec02 PanelThe fatal flawsHow do I get to Killarney? – I wouldn’t start from here. EMC will never escape from its origins – the stamping ground of ex RAF radio operators and the like. Later recruits are probably engineers who failed to cut the mustard as designers, or who were in any case in the surreal world of “defence” electronics. When a GEC or RCA product or similar failed to work properly, management would call in RFI “experts”, who would do tests and write awesome reports (later on copied out from the Don White manual). Like Don White, they drew on the theory and practice in AM and then FM radio developed during the first half of the 20th century when the number of transmitters increased and they began to interfere with each other. To understand the EMC magicians of 50 years later, it is useful to see them as dinosaurs stuck in the age of radio and radio interference, decades before the arrival of digital systems. In the IEE discussion on the teaching of electromagnetics on 12 December 2002, all the thirty attenders sounded technically naïve when they began to talk about personal computers. However, they demonstrate fatal flaws in their attitude which would remain a problem even if digital systems did not exist. The EMC specifications discuss conducted interference and radiated interference. Thus, the whole EMC community is committed to the idea that interference is of two types; conducted interference which travels down one wire and radiated interference which travels down no wires. This immediately confronts Kirchhoff’s Laws, which insist that conducted interference travels down two wires; the signal wire and the return wire. This brings us to the second, strange weakness in the whole EMC game. They assume that two interfering units will both be electrically connected to “ground”, which in their test rigs is a large plate of copper. As I moved further into high speed logic, my approach was to electrically float units in order to reduce mutual interference. Put crudely, when the length of the module is less than the wavelength of concern, grounding helps, but if it is longer, grounding hinders. (This was echoed when on 12dec02 the discussion on by EMC magicians dwelt on new problems arising at above 1gHz – wavelength one foot.) Thus, the very process of coming within the EMC specifications bans a potent way of minimising electromagnetic interference! In my case, I went so far as to design a revolutionary mains filter which, although safe and within British safety regulations for being DC earthed, floated at high frequency. The simple stratagem was to insert a choke in the earth line which had a DC resistance of less than half an ohm, and similar impedance at 50Hz. The mains filter was an open circuit between earth and the unit at anything much above 50Hz. This is discussed in my out of print book “Digital Hardware Design”, pub.Macmillan 1979, p83. [Editor; insert diagram, the one at page 88 of the 1979 book.] The filter came to market at about that time. The ideas built into that filter are crucial for limiting interference, but cannot be communicated to the EMC community or their testing standards, since both exist within a cloud of bizarre mathematics and prejudice, and would probably not understand my idea. They limit themselves to a low frequency world view where tying something to ground reduces interference and radiation. The worst comes by attaching two already interconnected units to ground, which increases the pickup of interference, even at lower frequencies, by creating a square loop antenna. Another fundamental flaw is the assumption that if the emission from one unit is less than the susceptibility of another unit at every frequency, taken one at a time, then there will remain immunity when a number of frequencies are emitted from one and received by the other at the same time. This assumption is implicit in the fact that EMC tests sweep through frequencies one at a time. This is true if a radio transmitter and a receiver tuned to another frequency are involved. However, if the susceptible unit contains digtal electronics, it is not true. Here we see confirmation of the EMC community’s ignorance of digital electronics, which means their ignorance of more than 95% of all of today’s electronic equipment. Another fundamental flaw in the EMC wallah’s thinking and therefore testing standards is their resort to averages. In the lectures on 12dec02, I heard that their aim was to estimate the peak emission of unwanted interference on the basis of measured emission. The implicit assumption was that any system, including digital, needed minimal average interference. They just do not know that if a digital system loses just one bit, the result should be assumed to be catastrophic. They cannot get away from their world, where a bit of interference of a voice over the radio is O.K. so long as it does not happen too often. The truth is that peak emission should be calculated, not measured with test equipment. Similarly, the susceptibility to interference should be calculated, not measured. This is the fundamental flaw in the approach of the whole EMC community, to test instead of doing what they have to do in order to be relevant. To be relevant, they must get involved in the design process; or else leave the whole problem to the existing design engineers. When a customer buys some equipment, he or his advisers should consult the design details, not the test results from an EMC test. The designer should be accountable if his design emits too much RFI, or is too susceptible. There is no room for an independent EMC community in a properly organised industry. Ivor Catt 29dec02 First article ends here. EMC ChallengeThe first part of this article will be in EMC-speak. If two modules communicate with each other via a cable, then that, along with their power inputs and earth, creates a loop, which will pick up interference induced by incident magnetic fields. The solution is to float both modules away from earth, so that the resulting system only presents a long single conductor with module at each end, representing a rod antenna. The techniques for doing this while still supplying 50Hz power to both modules was worked out more than 20 years ago. Two problems arise. Did any one in the EMC community ever hear of these published techniques? When they now hear of them, via this article, will they run away and hide, or will they comment coherently on the implications for EMC standards and EMC testing procedures? I promise that all who earn salary from the EMC scam will disappear into the undergrowth and hope that the matter disappears. [Editor. At this point, add as much as convenient from pp69 thru 77 and 83 thru 88 of my 1979 book] Second article ends here. http://www.ieee.org/organizations/pubs/newsletters/emcs/summer98/person.htm …. Martin Green, who in 1987 had established his own company located in the United Kingdom. Because of the coming European Union single internal market changes on the horizon, particularly the pending impact of the EU Directive on EMC, Mr. Green was very interested in developing a North American business subsidiary. As Mr. Green’s company was on the advance list of “to be appointed” regulatory bodies known as “competent bodies” for the EMC Directive, he wished to develop early market access to North American companies who might wish to have technical support and assistance to meet the CE Marking requirements of the EMC Directive. …. “The International EMC Society is a small group of hard working people who all know each other. ….” http://www.aemcs.com/emc_training.html …. Don White, the international EMC guru, is President of Don White Consultants (DWCI).
Ivor Catt tel. 01727 864257 Ivor Catt’s book on electromagnetism is at http://www.ivorcatt.com/em.htm IEE paper http://www.electromagnetism.demon.co.uk/y7aiee.htm http://www.electromagnetism.demon.co.uk/catanoi.htm |
||
|
The material below (in http://www.ivorcatt.com/2806.htm
) shows that, if the young lecturer (or even old lecturer), given the task of
lecturing on electromagnetic theory, finds no help from the text books, he
will certainly get no help from the www if he does a Google search for
“Transverse Electromagnetic Wave”. http://www.ivorcatt.com/2603.htm Nonsense about so-called “self-resonant
frequency” of a capacitor http://www.electromagnetism.demon.co.uk/z001.htm Displacement Current - and how to
get rid of it http://www.ivorcatt.com/2613.htm http://www.electromagnetism.demon.co.uk/20136.htm http://www.electromagnetism.demon.co.uk/17136.htm http://www.ivorcatt.com/28scan.htm |
||
|
The Fatal Flaw Ivor Catt 27dec02 The
rapid collapse of Marconi, alias GEC, is food for thought. Arnold
Weinstock, with the help of the British Government, forced the merger of all
British electronics companies into a massive company called GEC. This is
because the dogma of the time, promulgated by the then Minister of Trade and
Industry Tony Benn, was that Big is Beautiful. British industry in general,
and British electronics in particular, would only be able to compete globally
if it had companies as big as the competing companies abroad, for instance
Siemens. Previously,
it was said, the greatest merger Weinstock ever achieved was when he merged
with the daughter of GEC’s previous boss Sobell. This and more is discussed
in the “Stinking fish” article in New
Scientist, which led to a libel action which was dropped when New Scientist went for Disclosure.. Weinstock
asset stripped, and created a widely noted and discussed money mountain of £2
billion. He also talent stripped, so that for decades, GEC was an empty
shell. However, since all journalists were hostile to technology, and
ignorant of it, this passed unnoticed. It was well known within GEC that
Weinstock had got rid of the technical middle management, for reasons which
will be explained later. However, this did not deter technology-free (and
technology hating) city slickers and journalists from writing books about
GEC’s brilliant management, investing in GEC, and advising everyone else to
do the same. For decades, GEC profited from government cost-plus “defence”
development projects which often lacked any end product. Nimrod was an
example. However, in the same way as GEC would change its name when scandal
broke, so Nimrod was a name given to successful minor projects as well as the
major £1 billion spectacular failure. GEC
ended up valued at perhaps £10 billion, with Weinstock, the grand old man of
the company, owning a good percentage. The £2 billion money mountain received
frequent comment. Then came the time for the succession. First,
Weinstock tried to install his son, but ran into too much opposition from
major shareholders, presumably the Pension Finds. In due course, the lead position
went to Lord Simpson, who spent the money mountain and more on third
generation mobile phone licences. It appeared that he was getting away from
“Defence”. In
the space of only a few months, the mighty GEC was gone with the dotcom
crash, down from £35bn to £150m. That is, its share value was down from £20
to 20p. In the process, Weinstock’s holding collapsed down to a few millions. Technology-free
journalists (which means all journalists), noting that Simpson was a
technocrat, blamed the collapse on him. GEC had grown and prospered under
Weinstock for decades, and soon after that great manager and financier handed
over control, the company he had nurtured so carefully for so long was gone.
All analysts ignored the fact that the weapons industry gives only a fraction
of the return on capital invested of other industries, and that GEC’s growth
had been less than that of its competitors. These things had been remarked
upon decades earlier, but were now ignored in the rush to praise Weinstock
the accountant and blame Simpson the technocrat. The Collapse. Why
did a massive company, widely praised for its management (by Weinstock),
collapse so suddenly after he gave up control? The Market. Predators
noted that the succession made GEC temporarily vulnerable, or weaker than
usual. They sold GEC shares short on a massive scale. The scale of their
sellings made GEC’s share value collapse. The predators continued to sell, so
that the amount they had to pay on settlement day was minimal. By then,
nobody wanted GEC shares. GEC
was the perfect illustration of the fact that massive profit can be made out
of destroying a company. In the same way as one profits from buying on a
rising market, one profits from selling on a falling market. The only
difference is that, whereas a bull has limited commitment, to the amount he
buys, the bear has unlimited commitment if the market rises after all.
However, this risk is fully covered by selling through a limited liability
subsidiary. If things go wrong, the subsidiary goes into liquidation, leaving
Soros or the like secure but a little less wealthy. For
this wheeze to work, all that was necessary was for Soros and his ilk to
believe that GEC was in trouble, and together to be much larger financially
than GEC. They did not need to know that GEC was an empty shell. In any case,
being themselves technology-free, they would prefer a high-tec company to be
technology-free like themselves; that is, they would prefer an empty shell to
a real company. When
S told me that his top manager was trying to destroy his company which he was
trying to save it, he assumed I knew that money could be made out of
destroying a company. That is why he failed to explain the mechanism which
was demonstrated so spectacularly in the case of GEC a decade or two later.
That is, I did not realise that one can make money by selling short provided
that one destroys in the process. This is the mirror image of making money by
buying, or investing, in something which grows. The Truth. There
are no grounds for my saying that major financial groups knowingly destroyed
GEC by selling short. All that the above tale demonstrates is a fatal flaw in
the Limited Liability company. A subsidiary can attack a company or a country’s currency without the mastermind
being liable for the resulting destruction. In fact, no master mind is
needed. All that is needed is financial centres, for instance pension funds,
with large amounts of money to wield egged on by rumour. It appears that no
journalists understand the mechanism. So long as they all believe the same
story, the destruction results, and they are all amply rewarded. The
destruction is most likely to result without the predators knowing what they
are doing. Such predators as understand what they are doing sleep uneasily in
their beds, and stop doing it. Those that remain are those who do not
understand, and who are much more efficient as a result. The most efficient
system of all is if they are loosely directed from above by those who
understand the process, and live with the guilt. This
fatal flaw in the Limited Liability Company will be one of many. The
underlying flaw is that limited liability removes accountability, leaving the
big predator to destroy anything smaller. It appears that the damage is
limited by inefficiency. This means that as computers and the internet
increase efficiency, the predatorial damage will increase. It
is clear that our system, based on limited liability, is only viable if it is
heavily regulated on a worldwide scale. Weinstock-Style “Defence” Contracting. The
government used “Defence” spending to regulate the economy, so it was
erratic. Weinstock organised his company ideally for this. Lower level
engineers were hired straight from college, bright-eyed and bushy-tailed. It
took them only a year or at most two to realise that they were in a blind
alley, and leave. These bright young things were granished with a smattering
of more experienced temps like me, hired for the contract on double pay.
(Hired on a government funded cost plus 14%, the higher their pay, the
better.) When the next “defence” contract came along, Weinstock could hire in
this year’s graduates and some more temps, and repeat the cycle. He could
match his low level staff closely to the ebb and flow of the contracts. Middle
management presented a bigger problem. As family men with mortgages, they
were less likely to leave to save their careers. Weinstock left them on half
pay, so that only incompetents stayed. During low funding times, he had to
keep paying these poor men half pay, but all the same, they would leave in a
trickle. These
three ruses made Weinstock the ideal contractor for defence spending by his
buddies in government. On
my website I pointed out that it was impossible to conceive of Weinstock
being a crook, or even a shyster, because that year he occupied the Queen’s
carriage to the opening of Ascot, while his wife brought up the rear in the
second carriage with the Duke of Edinburgh. In any case, he was an
accountant, so these ruses may not have been intended. It was well known that
his sole interest was the balance sheet for each division, and if the current
six months proved poor, the man in charge of that division would be fired.
One journalist who interviewed him at GEC Headquarters reported that he had
no long term plans, or strategy. It is possible that the three ruses alleged
above developed naturally without any intent; the inevitable result of an
accountant’s approach to hi technology. Working
as Principal Lecturer down the road, I would ask my day release students how
long they intended to stay at GEC. Every one of them assured me that they
realised they must not stay long, or it would ruin their careers. An engineer
who spent more than a few employed at GEC was not taken as a serious
candidate for his next job. Of course, this applied to any engineer employed
in “defence”, but the principle operated with a vengeance in the case of GEC
(where I myself was employed for many years). Ivor Catt 27dec02 . Argument
for publishing this in Electronics World. WW has been in decline for decades. This means that there will be a preponderance of old guard who have maintained their readership from a long time ago. For the old guard, this article will be very nostalgic, and they will be very pleased to see these complaints about Weinstock’s management of GEC from a technical point of view (which was always suppressed) aired. More or less all of them worked for GEC at least some of the time. Its collapse will interest them. This kind of material was censored out for fear of Weinstock. After I wrote it, I started to search the www to improve it, and only then did I find that Weinstock died 6 months ago. This makes the article rock solid w.r.t. fear of libel. It was already safe, according to my judgement, even with W alive. W and/or GEC did sue New Scientist for libel, but dropped it. Thus, fear of such legal action will have reduced this kind of commentary, which makes it stand on its own, which is a good thing. The collapse of GEC’s credibility makes comment of this kind easier, of course. If you take part 2 of the EMC article, this third article goes some months into the future, unless you want to run two things in the same issue. Of course, this depends on how much else you have. Ivor 30dec02 @@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@ It is astonishing to compare my article (above) with the
standard stuff in the media, see for instance Brummer, below;
|