Early Life and Education
Ballard was born in Niagara Falls, Ontario, to Jessie Marguerite Mildred of the Rowntree's family in York and Archibald Hall Ballard of Staten Island, New York. His father studied electrochemical engineering at the University of Toronto and later specialized in the area of radiation. He was working at Carborundum Corporation when the lab director fell overboard from a boat during a party and was washed over Niagara Falls, so Archibald Ballard was promoted to lab director at a relatively young age in his mid-40s. He spent most of World War II at Oak Ridge, Tennessee, working on the atomic bomb.
After high school in Niagara Falls, Ballard attended Queen's University in Kingston, Ontario, studying geological engineering. Here he met his future wife, Shelagh, and they married and graduated the same year, in 1956. Ballard won a position at Shell Oil in Alberta, leading exploration teams on horseback. He left Shell for Mobil Oil and travelled around the world on exploration trips. During these trips his advice was often ignored as he was "only" a BSc (difficult enough in 1950s), and after several such incidents he decided to leave industry and took a doctorate in earth and planetary sciences from Washington University in St. Louis.
After receiving his PhD in 1963, Ballard worked as a civilian for the U.S. Army, specializing in microwave communications and studying how to hide refueling tanks under the ice in Greenland. Ballard was working for the Army at Fort Huachuca in Arizona in 1973 when the oil crisis hit. The U.S. government responded by establishing the U.S. Federal Energy Conservation Research office, and started looking for someone to run it. Given his background running projects, the Army seconded him to become the office's director, initially for six months.
He quickly grew disillusioned with the political system. "Energy systems are notorious for their long gestation periods, often twenty years or longer, there had to be a pay-off in a product within five to seven years in order to justify the public money being put in. There are political cycles involving re-election, so the politicians didn't want to put money into systems that were going to come to fruition in some other generation. You sent out the plans, and they hacked and cut at them." When the contract ran out, he decided to quit and strike out on his own.
Read more about this topic: Geoffrey Ballard
Famous quotes containing the words early, life and/or education:
“On the Coast of Coromandel
Where the early pumpkins blow,
In the middle of the woods
Lived the Yonghy-Bonghy-Bo.
Two old chairs, and half a candle,—
One old jug without a handle,—
These were all his worldly goods:
In the middle of the woods,”
—Edward Lear (1812–1888)
“If a walker is indeed an individualist there is nowhere he can’t go at dawn and not many places he can’t go at noon. But just as it demeans life to live alongside a great river you can no longer swim in or drink from, to be crowded into safer areas and hours takes much of the gloss off walking—one sport you shouldn’t have to reserve a time and a court for.”
—Edward Hoagland (b. 1932)
“Man is endogenous, and education is his unfolding. The aid we have from others is mechanical, compared with the discoveries of nature in us. What is thus learned is delightful in the doing, and the effect remains.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)