ME Candidate
EDWARD J. KEIBLE '65 of Rockaway, N. J., will be receiving a Dartmouth degree at his third consecutive commencement this year. A Master of Engineering candidate at Thayer, he collected his A.B. in 1965 and his B.E. last year.
"In this program it pays to buy your cap and gown," he says.
As an undergraduate he was a member of Sphinx, Beta Theta Pi, and won a football letter.
His emphasis this year is in metallurgy and design. But he attracted attention last year, along with Tom Morton '65, by inventing a machine which he describes as "a cable-forming device which does a twenty-minute job in one second." It interests Bell Telephone and Sylvania, to name just two companies.
Tom and Ed developed it as a project for E 172 (Methods Engineering). Thayer is seeking a patent for them and will get 5% of their 5% royalties when the machine is sold at the expected price of from fifty to a hundred thousand dollars.
Ed has already had feelers from potential employers, but he is heading for a Ph.D. in business or engineering.
He holds a scholarship from Cone Automatic, a Windsor, Vt., division of PneumoDynamics. His B.E. project involved the redesign of a work spindle to turn out high-speed automatic lathes which Cone sells to car manufacturers. His device is now being tested by Cone.
Ed's summer job with that company gave him a start on his master's thesis. He was a materials consultant for Cone and part of his thesis involves writing a codebook which is essentially a handbook geared to technical employees who are not engineers. "I have to take data on the properties of steel - sometimes a series of numbers - and translate it to qualitative remarks," he explained.
The other part of his thesis involves coordinating a materials system: selection, use, and inventory control.
Ed spends about 30 hours a week at Thayer, exclusive of study time. He takes five courses in addition to his thesis work and also works part-time in the lab for his adviser, Professor George A. Colligan. In his tutorial class of eight students, he takes his turn presenting a three-hour class lecture every two or three weeks.
"Metallurgy," he says, "is constantly changing. Theories are obsolete in two years, so that graduate study continually produces, or uses, or reports new knowledge."
The study of metals can take two approaches: applied physics, as they teach it at M.I.T., or engineering.
"I'll tell you why I'm an M.E. at Thayer," Ed volunteered. "During my summer experiences I've seen students from other institutions trying to solve a problem. It's got to be spelled out for them first. They might have the knowhow, but they can't see the trouble for themselves."
