National Academies Press: OpenBook

Memorial Tributes: Volume 5 (1992)

Chapter: Roy Bainer

« Previous: James Bliss Austin
Suggested Citation:"Roy Bainer." National Academy of Engineering. 1992. Memorial Tributes: Volume 5. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/1966.
×
Page 22
Suggested Citation:"Roy Bainer." National Academy of Engineering. 1992. Memorial Tributes: Volume 5. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/1966.
×
Page 23
Suggested Citation:"Roy Bainer." National Academy of Engineering. 1992. Memorial Tributes: Volume 5. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/1966.
×
Page 24
Suggested Citation:"Roy Bainer." National Academy of Engineering. 1992. Memorial Tributes: Volume 5. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/1966.
×
Page 25

Below is the uncorrected machine-read text of this chapter, intended to provide our own search engines and external engines with highly rich, chapter-representative searchable text of each book. Because it is UNCORRECTED material, please consider the following text as a useful but insufficient proxy for the authoritative book pages.

ROY BAINER 1 902-1 990 WRITTEN BY ROBERT A. KEENER AND HENRY E. STUDER SUBMITTED BY THE NAE HOME SECRETARY RoY8A~NER was born on a farm near Ottawa, Kansas, in 1902. For several years after graduation from high school he operated a wheat farm in partnership with his father and served as a summertime field service representative for a tractor company. He entered Kansas State University in the fall of 1921, obtaining his B.S. in agricultural engineering in 1926 and an M.S. in 1929. He was instructor en cl junior agricultural engineer cluring his last two years at Kansas State. He and Lena Cook were marries! in 1926. Roy joined the Agricultural Engineering Department at the University of California (UC), Davis, as assistant professor and assistant agricultural engineer in the experiment station in ~ 929, and advanced to full professor and agricultural engineer in 1943. Hewas chairman ofthe clepartmentfrom 1947 to 1961. His primary interest in teaching and in his research was agricultural mechanization. Among his research accomplishments was the development of a process for segmentation and clecortication of sugar beet seed that substantially reclucec3 the need for hand thinning, thereby saving an estimated ten man-hours of labor per acre. During the years Roy was chairman of the Agricultural Engi- neering Department, it grew substantially in size and stature and became one of the foremost departments of agricultural engi- neering in the nation. He, himself, became internationally 23

24 MEMORIAL TRIBUTES recognized as a leader in agricultural mechanization. He was a coauthor of two widely used engineering textbooks on farm machinery and tractors, and was author or coauthor of more than one hundred technical papers and reports. For many years the agricultural engineering undergraduate program at Davis was an option under mechanical engineering in the College of Engineering at UC Berkeley, with only a six- week summer field course and the senior year being taken at Davis. In 1962 when the Regents approved the establishment of a College of Engineering on the Davis campus, separate from the college at Berkeley, Roy Bainer became the founding dean of the new college. He served in that capacity until his retirement in 1969. His responsibilities as dean included recruiting of new faculty and seeing that curricula for the programs in the new areas of engineering were developed—duties that required a great deal of time, travel, judgment, patience, and the ability to evaluate and attract potential faculty personnel. During his seven years as clean, sixty-five new engineering facultywere hired and the College of Engineering total enrollment increased from 265 to 1,030. When he retired, the new engineering building, completed in 1966, was named Roy Bainer Hall in his honor. Roy was a member of the American Society of Agricultural Engineers for sixty-three years. He was advanced to the honorary grade offellow in ~ 946. In addition to numerous committee and division responsibilities, he served as president of the national organization in 1956-] 957. He was also a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. He was elected to the National Academy of Engineering in 1965, served as a member of the National Research Council representing the Division of Engineering from 1961 to 1969, and was a life member of the American Society for Engineering Education. He received numerous honorary awards, including honorary doc- torates from the University of California in 1969 and from Kansas State University in 1983. He was one of four engineers inducted into Kansas State University's first Hall of Fame in 19~39. Roy's international stature led to his service as a consultant in at least ten countries, beginning in 1945 with a three-month visit to England to help in the mechanization of sugar beet procluc-

ROY BAINER ~5 tion, followed by visits to Japan in 1948 and Chile in 1958 regarding various aspects of agricultural mechanization. Includ- ed among subsequent consulting assignments were involvement in developing a five-year professional program for agricultural engineering at the Agrarian University of Peru, planning a complete College of Engineering for the Kasetsart University in Thailand, and planning six commodity-oriented research cen- ters in Spain. Roy cried in Davis on January IS, 1990. He is survived by his wife, Lena, and his slaughter, LaNelle gainer. He will be remem- bered as a man who, characteristically, was enthusiastic about whatever he and his colleagues were doing. He enjoyed people and he encouraged inclivicluals to perform to the best of their capabilities.

Next: William B. Bergen »
Memorial Tributes: Volume 5 Get This Book
×
Buy Hardback | $107.00
MyNAP members save 10% online.
Login or Register to save!
Download Free PDF
  1. ×

    Welcome to OpenBook!

    You're looking at OpenBook, NAP.edu's online reading room since 1999. Based on feedback from you, our users, we've made some improvements that make it easier than ever to read thousands of publications on our website.

    Do you want to take a quick tour of the OpenBook's features?

    No Thanks Take a Tour »
  2. ×

    Show this book's table of contents, where you can jump to any chapter by name.

    « Back Next »
  3. ×

    ...or use these buttons to go back to the previous chapter or skip to the next one.

    « Back Next »
  4. ×

    Jump up to the previous page or down to the next one. Also, you can type in a page number and press Enter to go directly to that page in the book.

    « Back Next »
  5. ×

    To search the entire text of this book, type in your search term here and press Enter.

    « Back Next »
  6. ×

    Share a link to this book page on your preferred social network or via email.

    « Back Next »
  7. ×

    View our suggested citation for this chapter.

    « Back Next »
  8. ×

    Ready to take your reading offline? Click here to buy this book in print or download it as a free PDF, if available.

    « Back Next »
Stay Connected!