In many ways, the leisure-time activities for last year's inductees into Electronic Design's Engineering Hall of Fame are just like those of our readers. But in other ways, the activities truly represent their creativity, vision, and genius. These gifted individuals also find numerous and varied means to give back to society and support worthy causes.
A common pleasure, for example, is spending time with family and grandchildren. Imagine, however, what it must be like to be the child or grandchild of one of these inventors, such as Ted Hoff, who spends his leisure time in his machine shop. Like many others, this designer of the first microprocessor enjoys assembling computers and adding peripherals, but he also has fun making toys for his grandkids. Four of his grandchildren, aged one to four years old, had fun with a bubble-making machine that grandpa created for them. "The children just love it. It produces tons of little bubbles," he says.
He equally enjoys encouraging them to think. He'll often ask them, "How are we going to solve this problem?" Hoff says, "We encourage them to think about it. We ask them, 'What should we do?'" That same concept is used at Camp Invention, a summer camp project of the National Inventors Hall of Fame in Akron. Hoff is on its board of directors.
Hoff's other leisure-time activities include helping to create a computer history museum in Silicon Valley. He's also involved with the creation of a technology museum in San Jose designed to make technology fun. And, his home machine shop will soon be expanded when he moves into a new house. Those growing grandchildren must be wondering what else is in store.
Or, imagine being the lucky granddaughter of Bob Mammano, developer of the first PWM controller. He's busy making her a doll house, or more accurately, a mansion. It's three stories high with eight large rooms. "I've been working on it for six months," says Mammano. "It keeps my evenings full." When he wants something more active, he participates in a hiking club or goes to his mountain place outside of Los Angeles. "I get a chance there to chop firewood and clear brush."
Industry-related activities include putting on a training program for power-supply design engineers. "We pass on knowledge to new design engineers. It turned out to be very successful. It provides resources and technical information. The textbooks we put together are collector's items for their future design work," he says. Mammano also speaks frequently at local IEEE meetings and plays an active role in its applied power electronics conferences. In November, he's scheduled to give an educational seminar at the Power Systems World Conference in Long Beach, Calif.
Dr. James Truchard, co-inventor of LabVIEW and co-founder of National Instruments, also focuses on making engineering fun for youth. RoboLab (a collaboration of NI, LEGO Dacta, and Tufts University) gives elementary students a chance to design and create robots using LEGO bricks and LabVIEW (standard engineering software), then shows them off at Robo Mania. While also involved in community art programs and physics, his personal interest is engineering education. He serves on the University of Texas Engineering Foundation Advisory Council and other groups examining the future of engineering education and research. When he wants to get away from it all, Truchard heads to his two-acre garden of herbs, cacti, native Texas perennials, flowers, okra, and two dozen varieties of pepper plants. Veggies are scarce, "because you have to be there when they ripen." Or, he may head to his wine cellar stocked with a gamut of wine types: chardonnay, syrah, zinfandel, and cabernet sauvignon, for example. But they're primarily from one winery: Truchard Winery, run by his brother.
With a good Italian name like Patrizio Vinciarelli, you'd expect this man to have a taste for good wines, which is true. "Yes, that is one of my pastimes. Red wines extend your life," emphasizes the inventor of zero-current and zero-voltage switching technologies. He and his wife enjoy a tradition passed down from generation to generation in the family—having a good wine with a meal. His wines of choice are, of course, Italian. "I like Italian wines like Chianti because I can drink it without waking up with a headache the following day. With French wines, I always have a headache," he says. Naturally, he also enjoys returning to his native country of Italy. Much of Vinciarelli's leisure time, though, is spent trying to keep up with his five-year-old son. "Right now he's upset because I couldn't play golf with him. He likes to play in the kitchen where the floor becomes the green," he says.
Another wine connoisseur is TCP/IP's co-developer Vinton Cerf. He just finished pounding together 22 wine racks to hold 3000 bottles of wine from around the world: sauvignon blanc from New Zealand, white burgundies (especially the montrachets), shiraz and blends from Australia, cabs from Napa/Sonoma, brunellos and tiganellos from Tuscany, and reds from Rioja and Ribera del Duero from Spain. His favorites are 1970 BV Georges Latour Estate Reserve, 1953 Latour, and the 2000 Le Montrachet. He combines that pastime with another: reading science fiction (authors Robert Heinlein, Isaac Asimov, Hal Clement, Orson Scott Card, Robert L. Forward, Keith Laumer, James White, E.E. Smith, J.R.R. Tolkien); and history and biographies (Michael Beschloss, Winston Churchill, Stephen Ambrose). Cerf also collects stamps and coins. Non-profit boards he's on include the Folger Shakespeare Library, Gallaudet University for the Deaf, plus the Northern Virginia Resource Center for the Deaf and Hard of Hearing. He and his wife sponsored a project to close-caption BBC videos of Shakespeare's plays. Yes, he has needed hearing aids since he was 13.
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