{"id":625,"date":"2016-07-10T01:02:00","date_gmt":"2016-07-10T01:02:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/drmirkin.com\/2016\/07\/10\/simon-ramo-did-everything-right\/"},"modified":"2021-10-11T20:04:52","modified_gmt":"2021-10-11T20:04:52","slug":"simon-ramo-did-everything-right","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/drmirkin.com\/?p=625","title":{"rendered":"Simon Ramo Did Everything Right"},"content":{"rendered":"
\n\"\"On June, 27, 2016, aerospace pioneer Simon Ramo died at 103 years of age. \u00a0His quality of life never deteriorated with old age. \u00a0He played tennis regularly on his seven-acre estate in Beverly Hills. \u00a0At age 92, he was appointed presidential chair and professor of electrical engineering at the University of Southern California’s Viterbi School of Engineering. The patent he received at age 100 made him the oldest person ever to receive a U.S. patent. At age 103, he was still intellectually brilliant and had no obvious physical disabilities. \u00a0At the time of his death, he was still active because he did everything right in his career, marriage, lifestyle, intellectual achievements and patriotism.<\/div>\n
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He is considered to be the founder of modern systems engineering and was personally responsible for design of the “Cold War” ICBMs (intercontinental ballistic missiles) that could deliver a nuclear warhead to a target 6,000 miles away in 30 minutes. \u00a0He founded two Fortune 500 companies, TRW (which grew from two employees to more than 100,000) and Bunker-Ramo (now part of Honeywell). \u00a0He was also a competent tennis player and a concert-quality violinist who was so good that he played duets with Jascha Heifetz.<\/div>\n
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Strong Beginnings<\/strong><\/div>\n
Ramo was born in 1913 in Salt Lake City, the son of storekeeper Benjamin Ramo, a Russian Jewish immigrant, and Clara Ramo, a Polish Jewish immigrant. \u00a0The family name, Ramo, came from the 15th-century Spain Inquisition when Jews could choose between death or conversion to Catholicism. \u00a0At that time, no Spanish surnames ended in “o,” so the Spanish king added \u00a0“o” to names of Jews who converted which made it easy to keep track of the “conversos” and make sure they were practicing their new faith.<\/div>\n
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His father had him start violin lessons at age six. \u00a0When he was eight, his mother took him to the Mormon Tabernacle to hear John Philip Sousa conduct his concert band. \u00a0Three years later, he was a being labeled a child prodigy on the violin, so his mother took him to concerts by Jascha Heifetz and Fritz Kreisler. \u00a0However, hearing these violinists steered him toward engineering instead of a concert career. \u00a0 In 1995 he told an interviewer, “There\u2019s room for three or four concert violinists in the world — not even thirty. But engineering, for goodness sakes, there\u2019s all kinds of engineering, it takes a lot of engineers to work out all the things that a society needs.\u201d<\/div>\n
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As a child he was always smarter than everyone else. \u00a0He skipped several grades and was the best math student and speller in the school. \u00a0During his early school years, he worked in his father’s store and was able to save money. In 1929, as a high school senior, he paid the very large amount of $325 (equal to $4500 today) for an expensive violin that he used to win a regional music competition that won him a full scholarship to the University of Utah that was worth many times his original investment. \u00a0He later said that if he had left the money in the bank, he would have lost it because the bank failed when the stock market crashed.<\/div>\n
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In 1936 he received two Ph.Ds magna cum laude in engineering and physics from Cal Tech, but it was his talent as a violinist that got him a job. \u00a0At the height of \u00a0the Great Depression there were almost no available jobs, but recruiters from General Electric were on campus and Ramo entertained them at dinner. \u00a0Most of the members of Schenectady’s symphony orchestra were GE employees, including one of the recruiters. \u00a0He hired Ramo as a lab researcher because the orchestra needed a good violinist. \u00a0At GE, Ramo helped to develop the electron microscope and worked on war-related research during World War II. He also became the orchestra’s concertmaster.<\/div>\n
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