Harold Chestnut - Biography

Biography

Harold Chestnut was born in 1917 in Albany, New York. He studied electrical engineering at MIT and received a B.S. degree in 1939 and a M.S. degree in 1940. In that same year he began a lifelong career with the General Electric Company, which would last until his retirement in 1983. He married his wife Erma Ruth Callaway Chestnut in 1944 and they had three sons.

During the Second World War Chestnut was both a student and an instructor in General Electric's well-known Advanced Engineering Program. He worked on the design of the central fire-control system and remotely controlled gunturrets used on the B-29 aircraft. Later he worked in the Aeronautics and Ordnance Department and the Systems Engineering and Analysis branch of the Advanced Technology Laboratory, where he served as manager from 1956 to 1972. Here he worked on a wide variety of technical problems including reliability issues in rapid transit and the Apollo mission to the moon. Later in his career he returned to the field of electric power. This time the focus was power systems automation.

From 1957 to 1959 he was the first president of the International Federation of Automatic Control (IFAC). After his term as president he chaired the technical board, from 1961 to 1966 and the Systems Engineering technical committee for another three years. He served as honorary editor from 1969 to 1972 and was the first advisor appointed for life in 1984. Chestnut was also involved in the IEEE since its establishment in 1963 and served as president in 1973. He was active in the formation of the IEEE History Center and the International Federation of Automatic Control.

In 1961 Chestnut edited Automatica: The International Journal on Automatic Control and Automation. He also became editor of a John Wiley book series on systems engineering and analysis. In this series Chestnut published his own books.

In the 1980s and 1990s after retirement he created the "Supplemental Ways of Improving International Stability (SWIIS) Foundation" to identify and implement "supplemental ways to improve international stability". He devoted those years to this effort in which he applied principles from the control field, such as stability and feedback, to international political realities.

Harold Chestnut received many awards: In 1966 he received an Honorary Doctorate in engineering from Case Western Reserve University and in 1972 from Villanova University. In 1984 he won the IEEE Centennial Medal and in 1985 the AACC's Richard E. Bellman Control Heritage Award. Chestnut further in 1981 received the prestigious Honda Prize for ecotechnology, with it a substantial financial award from the Japan’s Honda Foundation. He was further a Fellow of the AIEE, ISA, and AAAS. He was elected to the US National Academy of Engineering in 1974 and selected as a Case Centennial Scholar in 1980.

In 1998 Harold Chestnut and the Chestnut Family provided a gift to IFAC for the IFAC Textbook Prize. The income from this generous gift is used to fund the award for an outstanding textbook author recognized at each IFAC Congress.

Chestnut died in 2001 in Schenectady, New York, aged 83.