Ronald B. Smith
American engineer (1907–1984)
Ronald Bromley Smith (October 28, 1907 – August 4, 1984) was an American mechanical and consulting engineer, business executive with the Elliott Company and later with M. W. Kellogg Co., now KBR, Inc., and inventor. He is known as 82nd president of the American Society of Mechanical Engineers in 1963–1964.
Biography
Youth and early career
Smith was born in New London, Connecticut in 1907, son of Isaac B. Smith and Emma L. (Stone) Smith. He obtained his BSc cum laude from the University of Washington in 1931 and his MSc from the University of Pittsburgh in 1937. In 1936 he had done graduate work at the University of Michigan.
In 1930 Smith had started his career in the industry at Westinghouse Electric, and in 1936 he moved to the Elliott Company in Jeannette, Pennsylvania. In 1938 he presented one of his first remarkable papers on a congress on steam-turbine calculation. His work got noticed because he had approached the reheat problem from the analytical standpoint."
By 1943 Smith was appointed director of Research and Development at Elliott Company, and by 1946 he had been promoted Director and Vice President. The research activities in those days concerned the "development of new types of power plant and process machinery, such as : gas turbines, gas and air compressors, turbo-expanders, air reduction and gas separation, heat exchange, deaerating heaters, centrifugal and axial flow blowers, superchargers..."
Further career, honours and awards
In 1948, Smith joined the engineering staff of The M. W. Kellogg Co. as expert in "gas turbines, superchargers, condensers, oxygen plants and power machinery in general." He had been hired by CEO Morris Kellogg personally, who was acquainted with several significant technical development achievements Smith had realized during the war.
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This entry incorporates text from “Ronald B. Smith” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.