Nelson studied electronic engineering at Michigan State University, served in the U.S. Air Force, and worked at Ford Motor Co. before moving into the editorial field, working on several magazines at Rogers Publishing.
Vern Nelson
At Ford, Nelson found himself the only electronics engineer in a department with about 60 engineers building mechanical prototypes. His job centered on moving from a 6-V to 12-V electrical system. According to Nelson, “When I hired in, they said, ‘You’re an EE. We’ll let you work on this project because none of the mechanical engineers want to do it.’ It was a wonderful opportunity.”
When the Ford project wound down, Nelson began looking for new challenges. “I was reading the Detroit News one Sunday and found an item looking for an engineer who can write about electronics. At Michigan State, I had worked on the Spartan Engineer magazine. I was editor during my senior year, so I knew a little about writing.” He hired on with Rogers Publishing and became the Detroit field editor for EDN. He found himself interviewing his old colleagues at Ford and reporting on projects on which he had worked as an EE.
One such project was the development of automotive transistor radios, and perhaps that’s where Nelson got first-hand experience with reliability issues. According to Nelson, reliability was something the early transistors lacked, and he recounted drivers making test runs from Detroit to Arizona would report, “They conked out on us in the heat of the desert. We didn’t have any music for several days.”
The sale of Rogers Publishing to Cahners Publishing in 1961 prompted Nelson to investigate starting a magazine of his own. He described how he chose his readership focus: “You had the purchasing influence, and you had the design influence,” both of which were already served by purchasing, procurement, and design magazines. “But there was this guy in the middle—he was working with components and reliability,” investigating such parameters as mean time between failures and establishing lists of approved sources on which design engineers could rely. Nelson asked a colleague working with components exactly what he did, and the response was, “Well, we are doing evaluation engineering,” leading to the magazine title, with the EE prefix added to emphasize electronic engineering.
March/April 1962
The focus of the new magazine proved to be a fruitful one. “The job title ‘evaluation engineer’ got picked up by some companies around the country,” Nelson said. But more important, the evaluation engineering topic generated considerable interest. Aerospace companies in particular, Nelson said, provided lists of potential readers, and the magazine became an industry force, supporting an annual IEEE reliability conference. “We got wonderful support from industry,” Nelson said.
Nelson Publishing began operations in downtown Chicago in 1961 and moved to Highland Park, IL, in 1968. Finding it uneconomical to continue renting office space, Nelson looked to buy property in Highland Park. Unable to do so, he moved the company to Sarasota County, FL, in 1981, where the company already had operations related to circulation.
Speaking from the EE-Evaluation Engineering’s current office in Nokomis on Florida’s Gulf Coast, he said, “We ran ads for good editorial help in Chicago and here, and down here we found better quality people, such as Debbie,” referring to Deborah Beebe, EE’s managing editor.
As the industry evolved, EE expanded its coverage. Nelson said the magazine began covering ATE systems built by IC manufacturers such as Fairchild as well as by companies dedicated to the ATE business, like Teradyne. In addition, Nelson identified ESD as a hot topic. The magazine began providing extensive coverage of the topic, served as a clearinghouse distributing training films prepared by the U.S. Navy and companies like Lockheed, and was instrumental in initiating and supporting ESD-related industry events.
As EE-Evaluation Engineering enters its second half-century of publication, the magazine continues to evolve. Hot topics today include energy, healthcare, and anything mobile, and EE will be bringing you news about the instruments and systems you’ll need to design, validate, and test products serving these niches. In addition to listing traditional topics like ATE and instruments, our editorial calendar this year for the first time highlights key technologies including medical test, remote monitoring, engineering apps, cloud computing, and green applications.
Noted Nelson, “To me, energy has always been fascinating.” He recounted that as a college student at Michigan State he also worked at Detroit Edison, where a major project was to upgrade underground power lines that had deteriorated because of a solvent that had to be used during their installation in the unusually cold winters of 1929 and 1930. Looking forward, we will be reporting on how to ensure power quality on a smart grid powered by inconsistent sources like wind and solar.
Just as the technology changes, so, too, does the business organizational environment. In 2010, Nelson sold EE-Evaluation Engineering and several other magazine titles, including Health Management Technology, Medical Laboratory Observer, and Clinical Laboratory Reference, to his daughter, Kristine Russell, president of NP Communications. Nelson himself now focuses on titles including Communications News, MAN-Modern Applications News, Designfax, T&P-Tooling & Production, and Manufacturing Center.
As we move ahead, all of us at EE-Evaluation Engineering look forward to serving you both in print and online as we pursue the original goal set by Vern Nelson: to be the best source of technical information for the electronics-evaluation and test industry.
Editor’s Note: The author of this article is not related to Vern Nelson.
25th Anniversary Goal Still a Worthy Pursuit
On the occasion of EE’s 25th anniversary in 1987, Editor and Publisher Vern Nelson wrote:
“As we look to the future, we want to thank you for sharing your valuable time over the past 25 years by reading EE. When we consider editorial material for EE, we ask a very basic question, ‘What will this do for our readers?’ That is the bottom line we have used in the past and will continue to use as EE moves into the next 25 years.”
From the vantage point of 2012, the EE editorial staff commits to meeting the same bottom line.