Simon Ramo and TRW

Simon Ramo, who will turn 98 in May, has had an accomplished career as a scientist, engineer and creative thinker. His achievements have made him far more than just the "R" in the diversified aerospace firm TRW Inc.

Born May 7, 1913 in Salt Lake City, Utah, Ramo graduated from Caltech with a double doctorate in physics and electrical engineering - at the age of 23.

Following graduation, Ramo became the director of research at General Electric. His work in electronics resulted his writing two textbooks which quickly became standards in the field: "Fields and Waves in Modern Radio," and "Introduction to Microwaves."

"Fields and Waves" has been revised and updated over the years, but remains a classic work. It is still in print under the title "Fields and Waves in Communication Electronics."

Ramo left GE in 1946 to become electronics research director at Hughes Aircraft, where he partnered with his old classmate Dean Wooldridge, who also had received his doctorate degree from Caltech in 1936.

After the U.S. Army Air Corps became the U.S. Air Force in 1947, Howard Hughes created an Aerospace Group at Hughes Aircraft to work with the Air Force. Ramo headed up the research end, while Wooldridge took care of the business end of the new group. But Ramo and Wooldridge slowly began to  grew disenchanted with working for the notoriously eccentric Hughes.

In September 1953, they jointly resigned from Hughes to form their own company, the Ramo-Wooldridge Corporation. They set up shop in a 1,000-square-foot rented storefront in Westchester that formerly had been a barbershop.

During the 1950s, Ramo-Woolridge Corp. became the primary defense contractor for the newly established intercontinental ballistic missile program. It would eventually develop the Atlas, Titan, Thor and Minuteman missile weapons systems, as well a variety of missile detection and interception systems.




By 1957, Ramo-Woolridge had grown from its humble barbershop beginnings to a company with annual sales of $44 million. Its facilities had been expanded greatly, with plants and testing operations added at nearly a dozen locations throughout the U.S.

In 1958, Ramo-Wooldridge merged with Thompson Products of Cleveland, Ohio, which had been providing the company with venture capital since its inception. The firm's new name, Thompson Ramo Wooldridge Inc., was a mouthful; it officially became TRW Inc. in 1965.

Dean Wooldridge retired from the company in January 1962 in order to become a professor at Caltech. (He died on Sept. 20, 2006 at 93.) Ramo became president of the computer arm of the company, Bunker-Ramo Corp. and, later, vice chairman of TRW.

As the company expanded, it diversified into areas besides defense systems, computer technology and space engineering. TRW formed its Credit Data group in 1970. Personal credit reports were known as "TRW reports" for years, until the division spun off into its own company in 1996, Experian.

TRW itself ceased to exist when Northop Grumman acquired the company on July 1, 2002 for $7.8 billion. Simon Ramo is credited for playing a key role in making that transaction a reality.

Ramo's list of accomplishments and honors is lengthy. In addition to the textbooks he authored, he also wrote books about business, technology, and even a 1970 book on tennis.

He helped design TRW's Redondo Beach facility more as a college campus than the usual sterile corporate setting, with the idea of creating an environment where innovation could flourish. (In March 2007, Northrop Grumman held a ceremony to rename a private street at the facility as Simon Ramo Drive.)

He created TRW's Space Technology Labs company, which became the first private firm to build a spacecraft, Pioneer 1.

Though he has been semi-retired for decades from the company he co-founded, Ramo continued to speak about technological and social issues over the years. He has received the Presidential Medal of Freedom and awards from the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE), the American Philosophical Society and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

As recently as March 2011, Ramo still was receiving honors, in this case, the Dr. Robert H. Goddard Memorial Trophy, the National Space Club's pre-eminent award for achievements in rocketry and astronautics.






Sources:

Daily Breeze files, especially:

"Multimillion Dollar Facility Evolves From Small Operation," Oct. 2, 1958.
"Ramo honored for visionary work," By Muhammed El-Hasan, March 21, 2007, Page C1.