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OCR for page 279
PHILIP SPORN
1896-1978
BY THEODORE I. NAGEL
PHILIP SPORN retired President of American Electric Power
Company and a giant in the electric power industry, died of an
unexpected heart attack on January 23, 1978.
Typical of the man, he was on his way to work at the age of
eighty-one at the time he was stricken. He died in a subway
station in mid-Manhattan while waiting for a train to take him to his
consulting office downtown. Outside was raging one of the most
violent snowstorms in recent New York history, through which he
had just made his dogged, determined way.
That's the way Phil Sporn was his entire life. He was a Jewish
immigrant from Austria, born there November 25, 1896, and
brought to the United States as a child. Then nine years old, his
vivid memory of Ellis Island as recalled more than seven decades
later on the occasion of his eightieth birthday—was that the lighting
at the nearby Statue of Liberty was bad. He devoted his subsequent
life to making things brighter, everywhere.
He received his Electrical Engineering degree Tom Columbia
University in 1917, worked briefly for Consumers Power Company
in Michigan, and in 1920 joined American Electric Power (AEP)
New York. His rise with the Company was rapid, and the growth
and stature of the Company itself paralleled that rise. While
AEP S Chief Engineer, he built an engineering organization that was
then, and remains today, eminent in the electric utility field.
On May 22, 1947, Philip Sporn became the fourth President in
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AEP'S history, as well as President of its seven operating companies
and other subsidiaries, providing electric service in seven east-
central states from Michigan to Virginia. He retired as President, at
age sixty-five, on November 30, 1961, but remained as a Director
until 1968.
During his career as Chief Engineer and then Chief Executive,
he led the AEP System in its quest for and its success in attaining a
number of technological advances. Among them: large-sized
generating units, supercritical-pressure boilers, natural-draft cool-
ing towers, tall stacks, and extra-high-voltage transmission and
lightning protection. Appropriately, the Philip Sporn Plant was the
first coal-f~red generating station to achieve a heat rate of less than
10,000 British thermal units per kilowatt-hour. Historically, since
the 1950's, AEP System plants have been among the nation's leaders
in this measure of generating efficiency.
Philip S porn was recognized as preeminent in developing the
principles and practices in the design and operation of integrated
and highly interconnected power systems. His book, The Integrated
Power System, one of ten books he wrote, is regarded as the au-
thoritative work in the field. (Today, the AEP System operates
sixteen major power plants, including thirteen coal-burning sta-
tions, with four more under construction or planned. Today, the
AEP System operates over 100,000 circuit miles of transmission and
distribution lines, including 1,330 miles at 765,000 volts the na-
tion's highest voltage. And today, the AEP System is interconnected
with twenty-three neighboring utilities at ninety-nine high-voltage
Interconnection points.)
He was very active in nuclear research and development, in
lightning protection developments, and in the development and
promotion of electric space heating. He introduced the heat pump
to AEP System office buildings in the 1930's.
He was instrumental in the achievement of three industry mile-
stones:
· the founding of the Ohio Valley Electric Corporation to pro-
vide the then-record electric energy requirements of the massive
uranium-diffusion operation of the U.S. Department of Energy
(then the Atomic Energy Commission) near Portsmouth, Ohio;
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· the successful persuasion of the aluminum industry, a heavy
power consumer, to move into the Ohio Valley for its electric
requirements; and
· the marriage of the investor-owned and member-owned elec-
tric utility industries, represented by the joint ownership and
operation of the Cardinal Plant in Ohio by AEP and Buckeye Power,
Inc., the power-supply organization of Ohio's rural electric
cooperatives.
Philip Sporn spent forty-eight years with AEP, including almost
fifteen years as its President, and six decades in all in the power
industry. To that industry he gave many of its technical advances;
from that industry he received many of its highest honors.
To list all of the honors is impractical; to list a few is meaningful.
He was a Member of the National Academy of Engineering. He
was one of a handful of nonacademicians ever elected a Member of
the National Academy of Sciences. He was a Fellow and one of
three honorary members of the Institute of Electrical and Elec-
tronics Engineers; a Fellow and Honorary Member of the Ameri-
can Society of Mechanical Engineers; a Fellow of the American
Society of Civil Engineers; a Fellow of the American Nuclear
Society; and an eminent Member of Eta Kappa Nu, the engineer-
ing honorary.
Fifty years before his death, Philip Sporn was recognized by the
IEEE with its national first prize in the field of engineering practice.
He subsequently won, among other honors, IEEE'S Edison Medal;
the Columbia University Engineering Alumni Association's Egles-
ton Medal; Columbia's Medal of Excellence; the ASME Medal; the
Faraday Medal; and in 1955 the John Fritz Medal, the highest
engineering honor in the country, presented jointly by the IEEE,
ASCE, ASME, and the American Institute of Mining and Metallurgi-
cal Engineers. He was also a Chevalier of the French Legion of
Honor.
He held thirteen honorary degrees from universities and col-
leges in six states and two foreign countries, Israel and France. He
was particularly active in higher education for decades and no
more so than in his "retirement" years. At the time of his death, he
was on the advisory councils at both the Cornell College of En-
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gineering and the Columbia Graduate School of Business. In
earlier years he had been a Visiting Professor or Advisory Coun-
cilor at Columbia, Cornell, Princeton University, and Mas-
sachusetts Institute of Technology.
He was also active in the administration of the Philip and Sadie
Sporn Educational Trust Fund, established for student loans at six
engineering schools. The fund began with a gift of $100,000 to Mr.
Sporn at his retirement in 1961, made up of employee contribu-
tions and company grants, and currently stands at $275,000.
But, Phil Sporn never really retired. He didn't even slow down.
Until his death he remained hard at work: as a consultant and
advisor to utility and industrial clients and to the Government of
Israel; as a lecturer, visiting professor, and advisory councilman at
some of the nation's leading engineering universities; and as an
author of books and articles for professional journals.
Nothing has been more symbolic of Mr. Sporn's "retirement"
years than his work on behalf of the state of Israel, especially with
the Weizmann Institute of Science, of which he was a Governor and
a Director of its American Committee. Years earlier, he had helped
organize and was the Founding Chairman of the American Society
for Technion (Israel Institute of Technology).
Back in the middle 1960's, after he had stepped down from the
AEP presidency, his grandson, Michael, one day protested that his
grandfather did not have the time to join the rest of the family on
an outing. "Grandfather, I thought you had retired," young Mike
complained. His grandfather replied, "I did retire, but I haven't
stopped working."
Philip Sporn is survived by his widow, Sadie; a daughter, Mrs.
Andrew Gilbert, New York; two sons, Arthur, an attorney in New
York, and Michael, a physician and head of the Lung Cancer
Branch of the National Cancer Institute, Bethesda, Maryland; six
grandchildren; and a brother.
282
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Representative terms from entire chapter:
power industry
