Chauncey Starr, founder of EPRI—the Electric Power Research Institute—and its first CEO, passed away on April 17, 2007. The previous day, a celebration of his recent 95th birthday had been held at EPRI, where Chauncey held forth for more than an hour on his life experiences and lessons learned. He was in fine fettle.
Chauncey Starr (1912–2007)
The following morning, while preparing to leave for his office at EPRI—as he had been doing ever since his "official" retirement 30 years earlier—he took his usual short nap after breakfast. But that morning he didn't wake up. It is hard to conceive of a more elegant way to depart one's life after a long and fulfilling career of service and contributions to this country and the welfare of its people. During my own 11 years at EPRI, I was privileged to have Chauncey as my mentor, collaborator, and friend.
The education of an innovative mind
Chauncey was born April 14, 1912, in Newark, New Jersey, the second son of a Jewish-Russian immigrant family. After being educated in the local public school system, he went on to earn undergraduate and graduate degrees in engineering and physics at Rennselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI). His 1935 PhD thesis at RPI was on the properties of rectifying copper oxide junctions. I once kidded him that if had managed to put some calcium impurities in his samples, he might have discovered today's family of high-temperature cuprate superconductors.
After RPI, Chauncey joined the group of Percy Bridgman at Harvard as a research associate. Bridgman was later to receive the Nobel Prize in physics for his work on the properties of materials under extreme high pressure. It was at Harvard that Chauncey displayed his knack for coming up with clever solutions to difficult experimental challenges such as extracting the intrinsic thermal transport properties of a given sample out of the confounding background of its surrounding containment vessel. It is one of those inexplicable coincidences of life that in 1960, 25 years later, I undertook my graduate studies in that very same high-pressure group at Harvard, where several of my fellow students were still employing the measurement techniques Chauncey had pioneered.
In 1938, Chauncey moved to MIT's Bitter Magnet Laboratory. There he continued to hone his experimental skills, now in cryogenic measurements on the magnetic properties of transition metal halides. In 1941, just before leaving MIT to join and lead the wartime effort at the Bureau of Ships on mine detection and protection methodology, he completed the design and construction of the first practical small-scale hydrogen liquefier.
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