College of Liberal Arts & Sciences

College of Liberal Arts & Sciences

• Trendsetter

  A fellowship has been established in the name of Iowa State's first physics Ph.D.

  Looking back on Robert Bowie's life, he seemed to be a step ahead of everyone else. After receiving a bachelor's degree in chemistry and a master's degree in physics from Iowa State, Bowie then became the first individual to earn a Ph.D. in physics from Iowa State. Bowie's wife Evelyn says it was necessity that led her husband into physics.
  
  "He was very strong academically in math, chemistry and physics," she says. "But the physics department offered him a graduate assistantship so that was what he got his degree in."
  
  In recognition of that, Evelyn Bowie has established the Robert M. and Evelyn W. Bowie Physics Fellowships on campus. The fellowships, made possible by a $100,000 gift of cash and securities to the Iowa State University Foundation, will provide financial assistance to deserving graduate students in physics.
  
  "The physics department was very wonderful to Bob and gave him such a good education that I thought I should give back a little to help future physics students with their education, " Evelyn said.
  
  After graduating from ISU, Robert Bowie joined the engineering staff of Hygrade Sylvania Corporation in Emporium, Penn., where he did physical research on radio tubes and established a physical research laboratory. In 1935 the laboratory was expanded with principle emphasis on television tube research. He continued to work for Hygrade Sylvania, eventually moving to Bayside, N.Y., where another laboratory was established. In 1960, these labs became the General Telephone and Electronics (GTE) Laboratories, Inc., a subsidiary of GTE. Bowie was vice president and general manager of the laboratories at corporate headquarters in New York City. He retired in 1964 from GTE and eventually moved with his wife back to Ames. He died in March 1999.
  
  In 1962, a group of Fellows of the Institute of Radio Engineers, including Bowie, were asked to "transport" themselves forward in thought 50 years into the future. Some 35 years later Bowie's article was published in the Proceedings of the IEEE and was accompanied by an article by Hans Mark, a University of Texas-Austin aerospace engineering and engineering mechanics faculty member.
  
  "It (Bowie's article) is a truly remarkable tour de force," Mark wrote, "because in less than two printed pages Bowie managed to predict with great accuracy what would happen in information science and industry in the subsequent decades."
  
  Some of Bowie's predictions were:

  * Centralized preparation of payrolls, statements, continuous control of inventory, forecasting of business and periodic statements with statistical analysis;
  * Business would be conducted in large part by the same communications network. There will be established a universal credit system by which every person who wishes will have an identifying number;
  * Every home and vehicle will have megacycles of communications bandwidth and will be primarily tied together by networks of computers.

"Substantially every home will have television, other forms of entertainment - financial statements - all by way of a vast communications network." Like her husband, Evelyn Bowie was a little ahead of her time. She started at Iowa State as a freshman at age 16. She recalls only two other female students in many of her mathematics classes and says she was typically the only female in advanced calculus courses. She graduated in 1929 with a bachelor's degree in mathematics at the age of 20.

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September 4-10, 2000

Ames, Iowa 50011, (515) 294-4111. Published by: University Relations, online@iastate.edu. Copyright © 1995-2004, Iowa State University of Science and Technology. All rights reserved.

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College of Liberal Arts and Sciences

Ames, Iowa 50011-1302

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Email: las@iastate.edu

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