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OCR for page 253
GABRIEL OTTO WESSENAUER
253
one rural home in four had electric service when Wess took
charge; by the time of his retirement, rural coverage was virtually
100 percent. He en cl his associates persuaded Congress of the
feasibility and wisdom of discontinuing the I VA power program's
reliance on congressional appropriations and allowing TVA to
SSUe ltS own securities.
The Chattanooga Times said of Wess: "He sees hisjob in human
terms as well as kilowatts and self-financing plans. He likes to
think of the transformation TVA power has wrought in countless
farm houses and mountain cabins, where water is now pumped
instead of carried, and where modern ranges, refrigerators, and
washing machines lighten the housewife's burden."
Although his work was of major importance to an entire
region, Wess was a humble, private person. He was a man of
spotless integrity. His example was reflected throughout the
organization he led; it had an enviable worldwide reputation for
quality and effectiveness.
Wess the engineer was ever efficient and usually reserved. But
he was also Jim, the loving husband, father, grandfather, and
churchman. He was a member of the church council and was a
Sunday school teacher for over fifty years. He was preceded in
death by his son, the Reverend James Wessenauer, and left his
devoted wife, Jenny; daughter, Joy; and six grandchildren.
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SAKAE YAGI
1904-1991
BY HOYT C. HOTTEL
SAKAE YAGI, former head of chemical engineering at the Uni-
versity of Tokyo, then executive vice-president of Chiyoda Engi-
neering and Construction Company, died on July 15, 1991 (born
Meiji 37) at the age of eighty-six. Because of his contributions to
chemical engineering education, research, and industrial appli-
cations, Dr. Yagi was elected a foreign associate of the National
Academy of Engineering in l9S1 and was considered by many of
his associates to be Japan's number-one chemical engineer.
Dr. Yagi's higher education started at Tokyo Imperial Univer-
sityin applied chemistryand led to research in the fields of optics
and infrared spectroscopy. Dr. Yagi left Tokyo Imperial Univer-
sity to become an assistant professor in chemical engineering at
Tokyo Institute of Technology, where he developed his interest in
fuels, furnaces, radiative transfer, and combustion. In 1935 he
was given a two-year leave of absence to study abroad. His first
year was spent in the Chemical Engineering Department of the
Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), where he carried
a heavy load of graduate subjects while doing research on flame
lengths. In a farewell dinner party for the chemical engineering
staff, he said that he would return to Japan to start many chemical
engineering departments in his nation's universities. His audi-
ence did not visualize the enormousness of his coming effort to
make that statement come true. Dr. Yagi spent his second year
abroad visiting important industrial companies and federal re-
255
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256
MEMORIAL TRIBUTES
search agencies in the United States and similar organizations in
Europe. During these visits, he had discussions in his principal
areas of interest with notable scientists and engineers, including
G. I. Taylor and Theodore von Karman, among many others.
On returning to Japan Dr. Yagi became the first head of the
new chemical engineering department at Tokyo Institute of
Technology. A few years later he accepted a professorship at the
University of Tokyo, where he became the prime mover in
establishing first a petroleum engineering department, then a
department of chemical engineering, and later, an expansion of
the applied chemistry department. He was a faculty member of
both of these universities, and students in chemical engineering
could study or do research at either institution, or both. A few
among many other activities in Dr. Yagi's early postwar period
were his involvement in a nuclear power plant project, another
visit to MIT to discuss research problems, and the heading of
A pan's firstworld trade fair. He had been one of the founders of
the Society of Chemical Engineering, Japan, in 1936. In 1961 he
was elected its president and arranged for a celebration of the
society's 25th anniversary, with invitations to members of the
world's major chemical engineering departments; a two-week
symposium was helcl, one week in Tokyo and one in Kyo to.
From heading the chemical engineering department at the
University of Tokyo, Dr. Yagi moved on to become clean of
engineering, then head liaison among chemical engineering,
applied chemistry, and petroleum engineering. Full retirement
from the university came in 1965, when he was made the
executive vice-president of Chiyo(la Engineering and Construc-
tion Company.
It is typical of the career of many a scientist-engineer-turned-
administrator to drop slowly out of direct productive research as
management activities increase. Not so with Dr. Yagi. His clefini-
tive research and outstanding technical papers and lectures
continued throughout his career. A brief summary of his output
in three areas follows.
The first field of interest that Dr. Yagi developed and ex-
panded was industrial furnaces and the areas of heat transfer,
fluid mechanics, and chemical kinetics on which furnace con-
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SAKAE YAGI
257
struction and operation were based. There followed papers on
flame luminosity, flame length, heat transfer, and a book in the
early 1930s on industrial furnaces. A generation later the book
was reedited and enlarged.
From 1948 to 1961 Dr. Yagi published many papers on chemi-
cal reactions in fluidizecl beds, papers typically showing that his
strong interest in theory and his high analytical competence
were motivated by the need for theory to guide practice. Atten-
tion to fixed beds overlapped the fluidized-bed research; papers
and lectures came on the effective thermal conductivity of
packed beds, coefficients of heat transfer, axial movement of
solids in packed beds, and temperature and concentration
distribution in fixed-bed reactors.
.
In Dr. Yagi's later years he turned to the broad objective of
integrating knowledge of chemical reactors to achieve an eco-
nomic optimum in their design and performance. The papers
were first on the properties of different reactor types, then on
the overall process of optimization. While heavily loaded with
managerial activities under Chiyoda, he still found time to
lecture at Nagoya University on reaction engineering and to
write a book on the subject. Collaboration with Professor H.
Nishimura produced an optimized process network based on a
linear model, which drew from an American expert the assess-
ment that the model was superior to more mathematically
complex models available at that time.
On retirement as executive vice-president of Chiyoda, Dr. Yagi
became senior adviser and chairman of the board of directors of
Chiyoda International Company, Inc. This involved many more
trips to the United States. Later he was appointed senior adviser
to Japan's Ministry of International Trade and Industry (MITI) .
When in response to a request from the U.S. Department of
Energy the National Research Council set up an ad hoc commit-
tee on the Industrial Energy Conservation Program, the com-
mittee arranged a trip to Japan. Dr. Yagi, representing MITI, was
a prime source of information for the committee. That ex-
change, between Japan en cl the United States, of knowledge
about progress in engineering and science was characteristic of
Sakae Yagi's dedication to the educational process, worldwide.
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