Arthur Morgan’s TVA-TSK Legacy

On April 9,2018 Barry Thacker will be the speaker at the Technical Society of Knoxville meeting. Parking in the Crowne Plaza garage is free. The meeting will end at 1:00pm. Visitors are welcome.

Tennesseans remember Arthur Morgan as the first Chairman and Chief Engineer of the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA), not to mention the founder of the City of Norris.  Morgan hit the ground running when he accepted the TVA job in 1933 by recruiting associates from his Morgan Engineering Company—Albert Fry, Harry Wiersema, Barton Jones, Carl Bock, Charles Locher, Ross Riegel, Ned Sayford, James Bowman, Emerson Chandler, and Sherman Woodward—for technical leadership positions at TVA. 

 Many of Morgan’s associates became long-time Technical Society of Knoxville members with Fry and Wiersema serving as TSK presidents.  According to TSK member Ned Sayford, Dr. Morgan called him when the TVA Act passed to say, “You are now the TVA engineering department—come on over,” which Sayford did at once.

Barry Thacker, PE, is a principal engineer at Schnabel Engineering, in Knoxville, TN.  He is also the founder of the Coal Creek Watershed Foundation, Inc., a not-for-profit watershed-restoration group.  Mr. Thacker holds Bachelor of Science and Master of Engineering degrees in civil engineering from the University of Louisville.  He is a recipient of the prestigious Hoover Medal bestowed by an international consortium of engineering societies, the joint ASCE/GBA Professional Practice Ethics and Leadership Award, and the Governor’s Outstanding Tennessean Award.  McGraw-Hill’s Engineering News-Record magazine named Barry one of construction’s top-25 newsmakers in 2013.

Mr. Thacker recently taught eighth-graders at Norris Middle School about the legacy of their city’s founder, which he will present at the Technical Society meeting on Monday, 9 April 2018. 

Future Technical Society of Knoxville programs:

May 14: Prof. Wes Hines, Nuclear Engineering Department, UT: “Nuclear Engineering at UT.”

June 11: Dr. Wayne Davis, UT, Dean, Tickle College of Engineering, UT: “The engineering college, where it stands and where it is going.”  

The federal government has been implementing policies to make government operations more sustainable. The resources devoted to making ORNL a model of sustainable operation have been significant and much of what has been done and learned may be of value to other organizations. Certainly ORNL started existence as the antithesis of sustainability in the frantic dash to develop the atom bomb and the change in the culture would be as great a challenge as the technical and financial challenges.

The Technical Society of Knoxville speaker at the March 12, 2018 meeting will be Bryce Hudey ( co-lead for Sustainable ORNL) The title of his presentation will be Technical Accomplishments of “Sustainable ORNL”. One of our Technical Society members attended the ORNL presentation at the October ASCE meeting and thought that this would be an interesting topic also for the Technical Society of Knoxville.

Bryce Hudey was awarded the 2017 Sustainability Champion for exemplary leadership with ORNL’s first “Battle of the Buildings”