Slavic Power

Have you noticed that Serbians, Croatians and others of Balkan Slavic ethnicity comprise a disproportionately large fraction of contributors to electric power development? The Russian Slavs have always been into bigness – big rockets, big Soviet May Day parades with big pictures of the leader-in-vogue, and a big land stretching over eleven time zones. Does this mind-set have anything to do with big values for voltage and current? Or is it the Eastern Orthodox predilection for mysticism, applied to such historically mysterious phenomena as magnetic fields and electric discharges? Whatever the root cause buried deep in the Slavic psyche (if not a spectacular null hypothesis of pure happenstance), some honorary attention to Slavic contributors to electric power development is due.

We can start, of course, with that quintessential Serb, Nikola Tesla. A technical school in Belgrade is named after him – the Tesla Institute – and the U. of Belgrade has a significant power electronics program. While we're dwelling on ethnicity, my ethnic group produced native German Charles Proteus Steinmetz, the mastermind behind ac induction motor theory (the steady-state theory which, for your own clarity of mind, you should not confuse with the more recent total-variable vector theory). "Charles Proteus" is not exactly a traditional German name. In fact, it's not German at all, but is the name Steinmetz invented for himself while immigrating at Ellis Island. (Charles replaced Karl, but Proteus is hardly the English equivalent of "August Rudolph.") While Steinmetz explained the induction motor, his contemporary, the visionary Slavic immigrant, Tesla, invented it. Without Tesla's creative genius, Steimetz might not have had opportunity for his own claim to fame.

In the 1990s, with the resurgence of "alternative science" (www.tesla.org) and new, improved perpetual-motion machines, a cult-like following has sprung up around the name and writings of Tesla. Deceased for decades, he is the perfect cult leader candidate, with as many legendary stories surrounding him as Steinmetz. Brilliance and eccentricity often go together. Telsa was a great showman, who loved to amaze audiences with technical feats, yet he was a loner, and died alone in a hotel room in New York. According to one story, Tesla could not go to sleep at night unless he experienced a certain recurring vision. What is inspiring about Tesla is his grandiose and glorious frame of mind. Tesla coils - you have seen his picture, in Colorado, sitting next to his giant Tom Swift-like high-voltage generator, the room filled with arcs. Tesla imagined global power distribution via some mysterious but very gargantuan device. Perhaps microwave beaming is the closest to it to have emerged, but Tesla gets credit for thinking big. Critical realists can at least honor him for his concrete invention of the induction motor. George Westinghouse credited him with much more.

More recently, and in connection with electronic power conversion, Slobodan Cuk of Cal Tech (www.cco.caltech.edu/~peg/group1.html), working in the late 1970s with colleague Robert Middlebrook, invented, patented, and developed applications of a clever new converter topology that melded the basic boost and buck configurations. (www.teslaco.com) The Cuk (pronounced "chook" as in book) topology can be made to have constant input and output currents – a remarkable equivalent to a "dc transformer." Later, others started moving ground around and this basic topology took on two other configurations, the SEPIC and zeta converters. In the 1980s, on the eastern side of the continent at Virginia Polytechnic Institute Etc., or VPI, Vatche Vorperian made a basic, simplifying observation, one of those elemental insights that theory-driven designers crave. He noticed that the basic SPDT current switch with inductor in series with the common terminal could be rotated, like that other three-terminal device, the transistor, to produce three configurations of converters. And Richard Tymerski, working with Vorperian, was the first to work out the presently-used small-signal switch model. Tymerski is native Australian, but of Polish ancestry. Poles are not from the Balkans but are of Slavic ethnicity, so he barely qualifies. More ethnically on-point is Ana Stankovich, a young EE professor at Cleveland State U., who graduated from the U. of Belgrade and got her doctorate at one of the big American motor schools, the U. of Wisconsin at Madison. Her thesis topic was on three-phase power-factor correction. Counter-intuitively, and to the amazement of her advisors, she found that ideal power-factor correction (resistive loading) could be achieved even when one of the phases fails. (http://fenncollege.egr.csuohio.edu/ece/index.html)

Joe Stupak, a founder of Oersted Technologies (www.oersted.com) in the Portland, Oregon area, is another engineer of somewhat Slavic descent and an alumnus of Cal Tech. A mechanical engineer by background, he designs magnetizing test fixtures and sells magnetizers. The big one comes in a stand-alone rack and sources up to 50 kA at the push of a button. Such high currents are used to produce correspondingly large magnetic fields that can magnetize ferrite or other materials into motor or speaker magnets. (At 50 kA, the parasitic application of Lorentz's force law is dramatic.) Also in the Portland area, working as a power converter designer and of Croatian ancestry, is David Baretich of Watt Resolve!. And former Tektronix oscilloscope designer Lee Jalovec (www.accupel.com), who has been to Mount Jalovec on the Balkan Peninsula, did the switching supply on two scope projects in the 1970s. He is from Cleveland, Ohio, which has a high concentration of Eastern Europeans. Perhaps you know Slavic engineers doing power electronics – or are one! While the English, Scots, Danes, Swedes, Chinese, and Germans get much of the electric power credit, a big share is also due to others, especially the Slavs.

Ó Dennis L. Feucht, 2000