Eleanor McElwee (1924-2008)

CONTRIBUTED BY ED MALONE

Republished from the April 2008 IEEE Professional Communication Society Newsletter

Eleanor McElwee, the woman who founded PCS in 1957, died of cancer on Dec. 11, 2008. She was 84. Before her death, I had the opportunity to correspond with her about her career and the early years of PGEWS. I would like to share some of that information with you now.

After graduating from a private women’s college in 1944, with a degree in English, McElwee went to work as a junior engineering assistant at Western Electric in New York City. “There was such a shortage of qualified employees in 1944,” McElwee wrote, “that companies were hiring any fairly intelligent live bodies, even women, who might be trainable. I joined two other women there who also had the same title…. our job was to check tube specifications and test data, and generally be go-fers for the engineers.”

To strengthen her qualifications for the day job, she took night courses in engineering at the Cooper Union for the Advancement of the Sciences and Arts. “You asked what it was like to be the only woman among a bunch of men. Cooper Union was the only place that I was conscious of being different and out of place. And I could tell the men there felt the same way.” She quit after the first year.

Rather than move to Pennsylvania with Western Electric in 1947, McElwee applied for a job at Sylvania in Kew Gardens, New York, and was hired as an engineer. Her job at Sylvania was to determine the reliability of sub-miniature tubes, which were used as fuses in missiles. She and her colleagues developed an innovative protocol for testing the life expectancy of 5,000-hour tubes in only 500 hours.

In March 1950, McElwee presented a paper about this subject at the National IRE Convention in New York City. That paper, “Statistical Evaluation of Life Expectancy of Vacuum Tubes Designed for Long-Life Operation,” was later published in the Sylvania Technologist (April 1950) and republished in the Proceedings of the IRE (February 1951). It led to her membership in IRE (April 1951) and a transfer to the Sylvania department in charge of writing and editing government contract reports.

When Sylvania announced it was moving to California, McElwee went on the job market again. She saw a newspaper ad for technical editors at Radio Corporation of America (RCA) in Harrison, New Jersey. Ads during this period were divided into male and female sections, and the RCA ad was in the “Help Wanted – Male” section.” By that time, late 1951, electronics companies had access to a larger pool of employees,” McElwee told me, “and were prone to consider women only for clerical positions.” Nevertheless, she applied and managed to get an interview. She was offered the job on the basis of her work experience, the paper in the IRE Proceedings, and a letter of recommendation from an IRE Fellow.
 
At the time, the Commercial Engineering Department at RCA’s Harrison plant included two technical writers who specialized in data sheets, and several production people. The only other technical editor was Charles Meyer. At first, McElwee assisted engineers with their papers and application notes and edited the RCA Receiving Tube Manual, which had to be updated annually. In later decades, she moved into management, supervising the writing and editing group at the Harrison plant and eventually, the entire Commercial Engineering Department of RCA’s Solid State Division in Somerville, New Jersey.

In early 1957, by then a senior member of IRE, McElwee organized a group of her colleagues to discuss the formation of an IRE professional group devoted to engineering communication. “Too many of us had seen audiences leave in despair before the end of presentations at IRE Conventions because they could neither follow the sense of the speaker’s presentation nor read the information on his slides. Most of the ‘founders’ were involved in some way with the communication of engineering information. Some were technical writers or editors at engineering companies. Others were editors of magazines such as Electronic Design or even the IRE Proceedings. Few were ‘working engineers’ at the time, but most had been. What they all had in common was the desire to help engineers, and IRE members in particular, to do a better job of communicating their particular accomplishments to other engineers who wanted to know about them….”

“There were probably 8 to 10 people at the earliest meetings. My boss [Charles Meyer] at RCA was one of the founders, which meant that I had great leeway in using company resources to keep in touch with people, set up meetings, etc. Remember, this was mid-1950s. We had no computers, no e-mail, no cell phones. Inter-personal communication was slower and more complicated then.”
 
Herbert Michaelson, a charter member of the IRE Professional Group on Engineering Writing and Speech (PGEWS), which later became IEEE-PCS, once wrote that PGEWS “was organized mainly by Eleanor McElwee.” Likewise, Charles Meyer, also a charter member of PGEWS, identified McElwee as “the prime mover in the organization effort.” PGEWS was officially formed in May 1957. At the first meeting of the Administrative Committee, McElwee acted as temporary chairman until a permanent chairman could be elected. That man, Daniel J. McNamara, appointed McElwee as Secretary — an office she held until 1964 and again from 1968 to 1969. She also served as PGEWS Treasurer from 1960 to 1962 and was a frequent member of the Administrative Committee between 1957 and the early 1970s.
 
McElwee allowed her IEEE membership to expire on Dec. 31, 1975, which ironically was the day before Emily K. Schlesinger’s term as PCS President began. According to Rudy Joenk, Schlesinger was “the first female president of an IEEE Society.”
 
I asked McElwee why she never wanted to be chairman of the group she had helped to start. She was nominated for Chairman in 1959, but declined the nomination. “The early years of PGEWS were marked by a different time and culture. Women were
just beginning to be accepted in other than clerical roles in the engineering field, in much the same way as technical writing and speaking were beginning to be acknowledged as valuable professional skills for engineers. I felt that some potential members might be more likely to consider joining PGEWS if the chairman was a male, preferably with some sort of managerial title. Besides, as secretary I had a lot more influence on meeting places, agendas, and the like than chairmen who served for a limited time.”

Although she never married, McElwee was surrounded by family members in Oregon, where she had moved after leaving RCA in 1979. She worked for another nine years as a technical editor at Tektronix in Portland. “I truly retired almost 20 years ago,” she told me, “and I never looked back until I got your letter [in 2007]. Now, looking back, I realize how fortunate I have been. I enjoyed my work, I kept learning new skills, I met interesting and delightful people, and I even got paid well! I wouldn’t change a thing.”

Special thanks to Dr. Ed Malone for his tireless efforts to capture these histories inside the IEEE Professional Communication Society.