Donald Christiansen, who transformed IEEE Spectrum from a promising but erratic technology magazine into a repeat National Magazine Award winner, died on 2 October 2024, at the age of 97, in Huntington, N.Y.

After growing up in Plainfield, N.J., Don joined the U.S. Navy during World War II as an 18-year-old. He served aboard the aircraft carrier San Jacinto, an experience that led many years later to a book, The Saga of the San Jac. After the war, in 1950, he received a bachelor’s degree in electrical engineering at Cornell University. From 1950 to 1962 he worked for CBS’s Electronics division, an arm of the broadcasting network headquartered in Danvers, Mass. It manufactured vacuum tubes for radios and televisions, and later, semiconductors.

But Don wasn’t a typical engineer. He had a burning desire to write and had a knack for crafting deft, engaging stories. By 1959 he was a regular contributor to Electronics World, a popular newsstand magazine published by Hugo Gernsback.

It was a modest start to what would be a rapid rise in publishing. A couple of years later, at age 35, he became a full-time editor at Electronic Design. In 1966, he moved to McGraw-Hill’s Electronics magazine, the kingpin publication of a thriving subsegment of the business press. And a few years after that, he was editor in chief. In those days, an issue of Electronics might have as many as 250 pages. The magazine had an editorial staff of about 50 people, with bureaus in Bonn, London, and Tokyo.

IEEE Spectrum, meanwhile, was a fledgling magazine. Following the IEEE’s formation in 1963, Spectrum made its debut in January 1964. Those early issues of Spectrum were a funky hybrid of house organ and magazine. There was a “News of the IEEE” column, often illustrated with posed pictures of conference organizers holding printed programs and smiling resolutely. A “People” segment noted career milestones of IEEE members, illustrated with yet more resolute smiles.

In April 1993, IEEE Spectrum won a National Magazine Award for its reporting on Iraq’s effort to build an atomic bomb. The staffers who worked on the report were John A. Adam [center] and Glenn Zorpette [right]. Editor in Chief Donald Christiansen is at left.IEEE Spectrum

The features were a varied mix, generally illustrated with graphs, charts, and tables. Some articles were only marginally more readable than technical papers, while others were sprawling, thinky pieces of actual or imagined social relevance. For example, the second issue of Spectrum featured an article titled “Graduate Education: A Basic National Resource.” During this era, mathematical equations sporadically swarmed into the feature well like ants at a picnic.

After about seven years of this, Donald G. Fink, the IEEE’s executive director (then called a “general manager”), decided it was time for Spectrum to have a full-time professional editor in chief. By then, Fink had grown weary of fielding the question “Who’s really running this magazine?” Fink also knew who he wanted for the role: Christiansen. Like Christiansen, Fink had been the top editor at Electronics.

Fink asked Christiansen to write a proposal describing what he would do with Spectrum if he were the editor. Christiansen’s plan was straightforward: Ban mathematical equations; publish shorter, tightly edited feature articles; and include more staff-written features. And he insisted on being not just the editor but also the publisher of Spectrum. Fink submitted Christiansen’s proposal to the IEEE board of directors, which agreed to all the conditions.

As editor in chief, Don showed an enduring interest in ethical conflicts experienced by engineers. In 2014, he told me how this preoccupation began. In the late 1950s, CBS was competing with RCA for a big contract from Motorola to produce tubes, including cathode-ray tubes, for color televisions. A group of Motorola executives wanted to visit CBS’s production facilities to see the CRTs being produced. The problem was that at the time, CBS had only six working CRTs and was experiencing problems with the manufacturing line. So they basically orchestrated a phony demonstration, making it appear as though the line was completing the CRTs in real time, before the visitors’ eyes.

The ruse worked. CBS landed the contract and soon fixed the problems with the manufacturing line. But Don never forgot that experience.

Spectrum’s November 1979 issue, containing a special report on the accident at the Three Mile Island nuclear plant, won a National Magazine Award.IEEE Spectrum

Don hired me to be a Spectrum staff editor in 1984. In those days, the IEEE occupied a couple of floors in a building on the northwest corner of 47th Street and First Ave., in the tony Turtle Bay area of Manhattan. Don’s office, on the 11th floor, was in the southeast corner of the building, overlooking the United Nations rose garden and, beyond that, the East River and Queens. The immense office, flooded with natural light, was like a museum, decked out with various certificates, diplomas, recognitions, and awards Don had won in connection with Spectrum or one of his other ventures, including McGraw-Hill’s Standard Handbook of Electronic Engineering, a cash cow for many years.

Don, it might be said, was not a gregarious man. During a typical day, he mostly kept to his office, his solitude gently but firmly protected by his assistant, the late Nancy Hantman. Still, he occasionally surprised us staffers. One day, out of the blue, he announced a photography contest and then submitted some entries of his own. These included a couple of very slickly lit portraits of fashion models wearing leotards.

Don’s rigorously top-down managerial style was very much a product of his time. He had an eye for talent, and he believed in giving people plenty of room to maneuver. It led to many great stories—and journalism awards. In 1979, Spectrum explained to the world exactly what caused the partial meltdown in a reactor core at the Three Mile Island nuclear plant in Pennsylvania. In 1982, just after the war in the Falklands, the magazine made a wide-ranging assessment of rapidly advancing military technologies. In 1985, we unraveled the chain of events that led inexorably to the breakup of AT&T and correctly predicted what it would mean for the future of communications. And in 1992, we detailed how Iraq tried to build an atomic bomb, and how the discovery of that clandestine effort led to new ideas about safeguarding nuclear weaponry. All four of those investigations won National Magazine Awards, putting Spectrum among the very few—count ’em on one hand—association magazines ever to win the awards repeatedly.

For many years after retiring from the IEEE, Don wrote a popular column called “Backscatter” for Today’s Engineer, a publication of IEEE-USA, the IEEE’s advocacy group for U.S. engineers. He wrote about pretty much whatever he wanted, but many columns drew on his firsthand exposure to some of the great events and people during an amazing time in technology. He never lost his passion for professional concerns: For several years he organized a seminar on engineering ethics for the Long Island, N.Y., IEEE section, of which he was an active member.

Don straddled the worlds of engineering and publishing in a way that few others ever did, before or after him. In doing so, he left an indelible mark on IEEE Spectrum, which still bears traces of his editorship. He also showed many of us how expansive an engineering magazine could be.

It’s a pretty sure bet that you couldn’t get through a typical day without the direct support of dozens of electric motors. They’re in all of your appliances not powered by a hand crank, in the climate-control systems that keep you comfortable, and in the pumps, fans, and window controls of your car. And although there are many different kinds of electric motors, every single one of them, from the 200-kilowatt traction motor in your electric vehicle to the stepper motor in your quartz wristwatch, exploits the exact same physical phenomenon: electromagnetism.

For decades, however, engineers have been tantalized by the virtues of motors based on an entirely different principle: electrostatics. In some applications, these motors could offer an overall boost in efficiency ranging from 30 percent to close to 100 percent, according to experiment-based analysis. And, perhaps even better, they would use only cheap, plentiful materials, rather than the rare-earth elements, special steel alloys, and copious quantities of copper found in conventional motors.

“Electrification has its sustainability challenges,” notes Daniel Ludois, a professor of electrical engineering at the University of Wisconsin in Madison. But “an electrostatic motor doesn’t need windings, doesn’t need magnets, and it doesn’t need any of the critical materials that a conventional machine needs.”

Such advantages prompted Ludois to cofound a company, C-Motive Technologies, to build macro-scale electrostatic motors. “We make our machines out of aluminum and plastic or fiberglass,” he says. Their current prototype is capable of delivering torque as high as 18 newton meters and power at 360 watts (0.5 horsepower)—characteristics they claim are “the highest torque and power measurements for any rotating electrostatic machine.”

The results are reported in a paper, “Synchronous Electrostatic Machines for Direct Drive Industrial Applications,” to be presented at the 2024 IEEE Energy Conversion Congress and Exposition, which will be held from 20 to 24 October in Phoenix, Ariz. In the paper, Ludois and four colleagues describe an electrostatic machine they built, which they describe as the first such machine capable of “driving a load performing industrial work, in this case, a constant-pressure pump system.”

Making Electrostatic Motors Bigger

The machine, which is hundreds of times more powerful than any previous electrostatic motor, is “competitive with or superior to air-cooled magnetic machinery at the fractional [horsepower] scale,” the authors add. The global market for fractional horsepower motors is more than US $8.7 billion, according to consultancy Business Research Insights.

C-Motive’s 360-watt motor has a half dozen each of rotors and stators, shown in yellow in this cutaway illustration.C-Motive Technologies

Achieving macro scale wasn’t easy. Electrostatic motors have been available for years, but today, these are tiny units with power output measured in milliwatts. “Electrostatic motors are amazing once you get below about the millimeter scale, and they get better and better as they get smaller and smaller,” says Philip Krein, a professor of electrical engineering at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. “There’s a crossover at which they are better than magnetic motors.” (Krein does not have any financial connection to C-Motive.)

For larger motors, however, the opposite is true. “At macro scale, electromagnetism wins, is the textbook answer,” notes Ludois. “Well, we’ve decided to challenge that wisdom.”

For this quest he and his team found inspiration in a lesser-known accomplishment of one of the United States’ founding fathers. “The fact is that Benjamin Franklin built and demonstrated a macroscopic electrostatic motor in 1747,” says Krein. “He actually used the motor as a rotisserie to grill a turkey on a riverbank in Philadelphia” (a fact unearthed by the late historian I. Bernard Cohen for his 1990 book Benjamin Franklin’s Science ).

Krein explains that the fundamental challenge in attempting to scale electrostatic motors to the macro world is energy density. “The energy density you can get in air at a reasonable scale with an electric-field system is much, much lower—many orders of magnitude lower—than the density you can get with an electromagnetic system.” Here the phrase “in air” refers to the volume within the motor, called the “air gap,” where the machine’s fields (magnetic for the conventional motor, electric for the electrostatic one) are deployed. It straddles the machine’s key components: the rotor and the stator.

Let’s unpack that. A conventional electric motor works because a rotating magnetic field, set up in a fixed structure called a stator, engages with the magnetic field of another structure called a rotor, causing that rotor to spin. The force involved is called the Lorentz force. But what makes an electrostatic machine go ‘round is an entirely different force, called the Coulomb force. This is the attractive or repulsive physical force between opposite or like electrical charges.

Overcoming the Air Gap Problem

C-Motive’s motor uses nonconductive rotor and stator disks on which have been deposited many thin, closely spaced conductors radiating outward from the disk’s center, like spokes in a bicycle wheel. Precisely timed electrostatic charges applied to these “spokes” create two waves of voltage, one in the stator and another in the rotor. The phase difference between the rotor and stator waves is timed and controlled to maximize the torque in the rotor caused by this sequence of attraction and repulsion among the spokes. To further wring as much torque as possible, the machine has half a dozen each of rotors and stators, alternating and stacked like compact discs on a spindle.

The 360-watt motor is hundreds of times more powerful than previous electrostatic motors, which have power output generally measured in milliwatts.C-Motive Technologies

The machine would be feeble if the dielectric between the charges was air. As a dielectric, air has low permittivity, meaning that an electric field in air can not store much energy. Air also has a relatively low breakdown field strength, meaning that air can support only a fairly weak electric field before it breaks down and conducts current in a blazing arc. So one of the team’s greatest challenges was producing a dielectric fluid that has a much higher permittivity and breakdown field strength than air, and that was also environmentally friendly and nontoxic. To minimize friction, this fluid also had to have very low viscosity, because the rotors would be spinning in it. A dielectric with high permittivity concentrates the electric field between oppositely charged electrodes, enabling greater energy to be stored in the space between them. After screening hundreds of candidates over several years, the C-Motive team succeeded in producing an organic liquid dielectric with low viscosity and a relative permittivity in the low 20s. For comparison, the relative permittivity of air is 1.

Another challenge was supplying the 2,000 volts their machine needs to operate. High voltages are necessary to create the intense electric fields between the rotors and stators. To precisely control these fields, C-Motive was able to take advantage of the availability of inexpensive and stupendously capable power electronics, according to Ludois. For their most recent motor, they developed a drive system based on readily available 4.5-kilovolt insulated-gate bipolar transistors, but the rate of advancement in power semiconductors means they have many attractive choices here, and will have even more in the near future.

Ludois reports that C-Motive is now testing a 750-watt (1 hp) motor in applications with potential customers. Their next machines will be in the range of 750 to 3,750 watts (1 to 5 hp), he adds. These will be powerful enough for an expanded range of applications in industrial automation, manufacturing, and heating, ventilating, and air conditioning.

It’s been a gratifying ride for Ludois. “For me, a point of creative pride is that my team and I are working on something radically different that, I hope, over the long term, will open up other avenues for other folks to contribute.”