Experimental Techniques May/June 2001, Vol. 25, No. 3
Joseph Marin
SESA President 1954-1055
By C. E. Taylor, SEM Historian
Dr. Joseph Marin was the twelfth president of the
SESA. He was well known as an
educator, as a practicing engineer, and as a consultant. His research results and his textbooks
on materials and on mechanics were
widely used by engineers. The
following article about Joe Marin was written shortly after his
death:
Dr. Joseph Marin 1905-1966
Joseph Marin, distinguished visiting professor at
the United States Naval Postgraduate School and a past president of the Society
for Experimental Stress Analysis, died in Monterey, Calif. on August 21
following a brief illness.
Dr. Marin was born in New York City on June 7,
1905. He received BA and BSc
degrees from the University of British Columbia, and an MS degree from the
University of Illinois. In 1936, he
earned his doctorate in engineering mechanics at the University of
Michigan.
After teaching at Rutgers from 1930 to 1939, Dr.
Marin went to the Illinois Institute of Technology where he taught from 1939
through 1942. In 1942 he joined The
Pennsylvania State University and served as professor of engineering Mechanics
and research professor of engineering materials until 1953. It was in 1953 that he was made head of
the department of engineering mechanics, a position he held until going to the
U.S. Naval Postgraduate School last year.
Dr. Marin was not only an educator. He had served as part-time consultant on
stress analysis and materials for many organizations, including Westinghouse
Manufacturing Corp. and the Curtiss Wright Corp.
His work on over fifty projects sponsored by
various government agencies led to the publication of six books and over 150
technical papers.
The recipient of many awards and honors, Dr. Marin,
in 1949, was given the George Westinghouse Award by the Society for Engineering
Education for excellence in teaching.
In 1952 and 1953, he was a Fullbright Professor at the Norwegian
Institute of Technology. In 1956, Dr. Marin received a Guggenheim award for
research. Acting on an invitation
from the Academy of Science of the USSR, he went to Russia in 1962 to lecture.
In 1964, he was made a Fellow in the American Society of Mechanical
Engineers.
Dr. Marin was also an honorary editor of the
International Journal of Mechanical Science and the International
Journal on Mechanical Engineering Education.
In addition to the SESA, ASEE and ASME, he was a
member of a number of other professional and honorary societies. At the time of his death he was on the
SESA’s Silver Anniversary Committee which is planning the commemorative
activities for 1968.
Dr. Marin is survived by his wife and two
sisters.
Experimental Mechanics, October 1966
The preceding article was written thirty-five years
ago by people who knew Joe Marin well and I am reluctant to change even one word
of it. However, the in the SEM
History series we endeavor to go beyond the mere reporting of the places of
employment, lists of honors, and numbers of publications for the people
responsible for our proud SESA/SEM legacy.
Toward that end, I will add that Joe was a tall handsome, impressive man
who was very congenial and yet quite serious, and I will include two of my
favorite memories of Joe Marin. The
first one goes back to the mid 1950s when Joe and I were on the SESA Executive
Committee. In those years Bill
Murray was the Secretary-Treasurer and had only one secretary to help him in his
office at MIT. Almost all of the
Society’s business was conducted by the Executive Committee at its semiannual
meetings. We had very full agendas
with new business, old business, reports from every committee chairman,
etc. Typically, the meetings
started after dinner and lasted all night.
I am sure we made many earth shaking decisions during those meetings, but
the only thing that I remember is that Joe and I always went straight from the
meeting to breakfast. Even after those long grueling sessions, Joe still had a
good sense of humor. But my
favorite Joe Marin memory resulted from a time when we were both attending a
Pressure Vessel Research Committee meeting in New York. We had one afternoon free so Joe invited
me to come as his guest to Yankee Stadium to see a baseball game. (I was not at all affluent then and
couldn’t have afforded it otherwise).
The Yankees had a new kid in center field that showed a lot of
potential. His name was Mickey
Mantle. Whenever I think of
Joe Marin, my thoughts go back to Yankee Stadium and Joe’s
generosity.
Realizing that my own personal memories of Joe
Marin are inadequate, I contacted my longtime good friend Richard (Rich) McNitt
at Penn State University. Rich is
the Head of the Department of Engineering Science and Mechanics now, but was a
graduate student in that department when Joe Marin was the head back in the
1950s. Rich sent me a 154 page book
written by Dr. Norman Davids, entitled, ‘Growing and Changing with the Times
1905 - 1995’ and published by Penn State.
Predictably many pages in that book are devoted to Dr. Marin, and several
long quotes follow:
From Chapter 3 Growth under Dr. Marin 1953-1965 (Imprint of Dr. Marin, a
dominant figure) “While transitions usually occur gradually, we might point
to 1953 as a milestone in the history of the department. We are referring specifically to the
accession of Dr. Joseph Marin as department head, after Dr. Sauer left the
department, first to take a sabbatical in Cambridge, and then to become head of
the Physics Department in the School of Chemistry and Physics. The field of mechanics was rapidly
expanding its interests and shaping its identity, becoming aware of its
distinction from the more established engineering disciplines. Its formative period since the stimulus
given to the field since World War II might be said to have stabilized, sorely
needed at this time, and buttressed by influxes of new faculty.
‘“Dr. Marin earned ..... a PhD from the University
of Michigan, where he studied applied mechanic and especially stress analysis
under Professor Timoshenko (as did SESA luminaries, Max Frocht and Miklos
Hetenyi). ... An unusual feature of Marin’s education was that he also earned a
bachelor of arts from British Columbia in 1958, thirty years after his
B.Sc. In connection with this, he
was one of two in the Engineering School to receive the Liberal Arts award of
Phi Beta Kappa (N. Davids was the other).
When the headship became open again in 1952, he accepted reluctantly and
defensively, in preference to having someone take over with policies he felt
would be undesirable.
“He very quickly learned the ropes, however, and
took charge in a very forthright manner.
He would give a task to his secretary with assurances that it would not
have to be done with any degree of urgency. But within a short time he would ask
with perhaps a tone of impatience, ‘... is that report ready
yet?’.....
“Dr. Marin, in addition to being a hard worker
himself, made sure his students toed the mark and produced the required
output. Undoubtedly this influenced
their characters as well. Most of
his graduate student went on to become very competent engineers, or professors
in our own department. One of them,
Rich McNitt, became head of the department in 1981.
“Rich, in his reminiscences, tells how he occupied
Professor Vierck’s large corner office in Engineering A facing the president’s
residence and shared it with Ted Thomas and Ben Sparks (who are now deceased)
and Alan Terrill. He remembers how
on Saturdays, a required working day, Dr. Marin used to call up to check on
their presence in the office. On
learning who answered the phone (he knew all the voices), he would ask for
someone else, and if that unfortunate individual was not in, he would ask for
yet another person. In this way he
effectively ‘took attendance.’
“Dr. Marin was noted for being a very genial host,
and his parties in Boalburg were famous and remembered to this day by those who
were here at the time. His
international pot luck dinner on November 8, 1958, to which all faculty and
graduate students were invited, marked a high point in sumptuousness. It turned out there was considerable
expertise among the group on native dishes from their country of origin or
background, including paella, samosas, pecan pie, and Latvian meat
pastries. Oriental dishes
outnumbered the rest. Even the
subsequent write-up of the recipes had a mechanics slant in that drawings were
shown in the style of a textbook in statics of how to prepare egg-rolls with
cylindrical and axial displacements (stresses?). Marin would always serve his
famous “Boulsburg orange juice” which got its name from the pitcher of orange
juice he once prepared - or so he thought.
Asking Sam Zamrik’s assistance in its preparation, Sam took it into the
kitchen and poured a bottle of vodka into it (accidentally?). The results were such a success that the
recipe became established for all future parties.
“Dr. Marin retired with emeritus rank from the
University on November 1, 1965, taking a position at the Naval Postgraduate
School in Monterey, California.
Unfortunately, he did not enjoy his new position very long as he died
there on August 21 of the following year.
His accomplishments were many and noteworthy. He had been a member of the Penn State
faculty for twenty-three years and head of the Mechanics Department for
twelve. During his years here he
had trained over 170 students qualified for degrees in mechanics, more than half
of them developing their theses under him.
He had wide experience in teaching and research, and in engineering
practice. He conducted research
projects in the fields of materials and stress analysis for numerous government
and industrial organizations, and published 162 papers and six books in
mechanics. He had been consultant
for numerous industrial organizations on stress analysis and material
properties. He was a member of
various technical committees and of national engineering societies and served as
president of the Society for Experimental Stress Analysis.
“Dr. Marin had a great impact on the department by
serving as a catalyst. He could get
his students, his faculty, and others to work hard, partially through cajolery,
through some pressure, but notably through example. He was so closely involved with the
department that even on His Russian trip he would call in from far-away places
to check that all was going properly.
He realized the importance of publications in the academic world as a
mean of disseminating new information as a stimulus to research. His own output of papers was enormous;
although not all of it could be considered of major significance, he and his
fellow researchers extracted every nuggets of interest in their
productions. Dr. Marin was a shaper
and a shaker. As a dominant figure
in this formative period of developing science within mechanics. Dr. Marin, though personally on the side
of practicality, was able to appreciate and encourage in his faculty the
theoretical and analytical side as well.
He would exert his influence to keep theorizers from straying too far
from the practical (something which is often needed).
“Dr. Marin led a life-long campaign for the
introduction of the term ‘mechanics of the solid state’ as a worthy companion to
‘physics of the solid state.’ In
fulfillment of his wish and in honor of his memory, a volume was published with
this title by two of his former students, F. P. J. Rimrott and J. Schwaighofer,
containing nineteen contributed papers from his colleagues and students. This volume was supposed to be dedicated
to Professor Marin on the occasion of his sixtieth birthday in 1965, but his
death occurred during its preparation.
It was a fitting memorial to his approach, which is presented in its
fully-matured form....
“The ‘Joseph Marin Memorial Scholarship Fund’,
established at Penn State to honor and perpetuate his memory, is awarded
annually to a worthy and qualified undergraduate majoring in his
department.”
Those familiar with SESA/SEM history may remember that after Ben Lazan (SESA President 1959-60) was first diagnosed with a brain tumor in the summer of 1965. he took sabbatical leave and spent the 1965-66 academic year with Joe Marin at the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey. Sadly they both died in the summer of 1966, and so did Irwin Vigness (SESA President 1961-62). It was indeed a bad year for the SESA. Now, thirty-five years later, we still treasure their memories and are thankful for their many contributions.