Guyford Stever
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Horton Guyford Stever (born October 24, 1916) is a U.S. administrator, physicist, educator, and engineer.
Stever graduated from California Institute of Technology in 1941 with a Ph.D. in physics. He then joined the staff of the radiation lab at MIT. In 1942 he served the military as a scientific liaison officer based in London, England until the end of World War II.
He returned to MIT, serving as associated dean of engineering there from 1956-1959. In 1965 he became president of Carnegie Mellon University, a position he held until 1972.
He also served as the director of the National Science Foundation from 1972 until 1976. Between 1973 and 1977 he was a presidential science advisor.
Stever received a LL.D. from Bates College in 1977. In 1997, he received the Vannevar Bush Award from the National Science Board.
[edit] The Stever committee
Guyford Stever was chairman of the NACA"s Special Committee on Space Technology also called the Stever Committee. It was a special steering committee that was formed with the mandate to coordinate various branches of the Federal government, private companies as well as universities within the United States with NACA's objectives and also harness their expertise in order to develop a space program.[1]
Remarkably, Hendrik Wade Bode, the man who helped develop the robot weapons that brought down the Nazi V-1 flying bombs over London during WWII, was actually serving in the same committee and sitting at the same table as the chief engineer of the V-1, the weapon that terrorised London: Wernher von Braun.[2][3]
As of their meeting on May 26 1958, committee members, starting clockwise from the left of the adjacent picture, included:[1]
| Committee member | Title |
|---|---|
| Edward R. Sharp | Director of the Lewis Flight Propulsion Laboratory |
| Colonel Norman C Appold | Assistant to the Deputy Commander for Weapons Systems, Air Research and Development Command: US Air Force |
| Abraham Hyatt | Research and Analysis Officer Bureau of Aeronautics, Department of the Navy |
| Hendrik Wade Bode | Director of Research Physical Sciences, Bell Telephone Laboratories |
| W Randolph Lovelace II | Lovelace Foundation for Medication Education and Research |
| S. K Hoffman | General Manager, Rocketdyne Division, North American Aviation |
| Milton U Clauser | Director, Aeronautical Research Laboratory, The Ramo-Wooldridge Corporation |
| H. Julian Allen | Chief, High Speed Flight Research, NACA Ames |
| Robert R. Gilruth | Assistant Director, NACA Langley |
| J. R. Dempsey | Manager. Convair-Astronautics (Division of General Dynamics) |
| Carl B. Palmer | Secretary to Committee, NACA Headquarters |
| H. Guyford Stever | Chairman, Associate Dean of Engineering, Massachusetts Institute of Technology |
| Hugh L. Dryden | (ex officio), Director, NACA |
| Dale R. Corson | Department of Physics, Cornell University |
| Abe Silverstein | Associate Director, NACA Lewis |
| Wernher von Braun | Director, Development Operations Division, Army Ballistic Missile Agency |
[edit] Footnotes and references
- ^ a b NASA Historical Website
- ^ ...missile research centre run by Wernher von Braun, who later worked on the American space programme (10 June 2001 Germans at last learn truth about von Braun's 'space research' base. By Tony Paterson in Peenemunde, The Telegraph. Retrieved 9-3-07)
- ^ ...Von Braun soon went to work at a secret laboratory called Peenemünde near the Baltic Sea, working on the V-1 missile, which would terrorize Londoners (IEEE Virtual Museum Retrieved 9-3-07)
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