Deceased--George Shor Jr.

George Shor Jr.

June 8th, 1923 to July 3rd, 2009

"George Shor Jr. dies at 86; Scripps geophysicist studied the ocean floor"

Shor's work helped lay the foundation for the theory of tectonic plates and continental drift.

by

Thomas H. Maugh II

July 11th, 2009

Los Angeles Times

George G. Shor Jr., the Scripps geophysicist whose study of the ocean floor helped lay the foundation for the theory of tectonic plates and continental drift, died July 3 at his home in La Jolla from complications following a series of strokes. He was 86.

He helped develop the United States' fleet of ocean-going research vessels, was a principal in the abortive Project Mohole to drill a hole deep into the Earth and played a key role in the creation of the California Sea Grant program, which funds marine and coastal research.

"He mentored students ashore and at sea, but his strength was teaching people geophysics at sea," said geologist Robert L. Fisher, a professor emeritus at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography at UC San Diego, where Shor spent most of his career. He was a talented administrator and experimenter, and if he saw something that didn't work in either area, "he would diddle with it to make it better," Fisher said.

Shor joined Scripps in 1953 at the beginning of what researchers have dubbed the golden age of oceanography, in which research vessels from Scripps, Columbia University, Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution and Cambridge University explored the oceans, trailing magnetometers and other sophisticated instruments to detect the overall structure of the ocean floor and anomalies beneath it. He began his work in the Gulf of Alaska, a region with a little known geological history, then led expeditions into the Indian Ocean.

During the International Geophysical Year in 1957 and 1958, he led expeditions to the Southeast Pacific.

His work and that of others eventually led to the conclusion that the planet's continents reside on massive tectonic plates that are adrift on an ocean of volcanic magma far below the Earth's surface, pulling apart in some areas to create deep trenches in the ocean and jamming together in others to create massive mountain ranges.

Near the end of his career, he coordinated the activities of Scripps' research fleet, scheduling voyages and allocating resources. He also helped create and served on the University-National Oceanographic Laboratory System, which coordinates operations of research ships throughout the world.

In the 1950s, he joined Project Mohole, which was designed to retrieve a sample of material from the Earth's mantle by drilling through the Mohorovicic discontinuity, which resides as much as three miles under the ocean floor and up to 25 miles below the surface of continents. Shor and Scripps geophysicist Russell W. Raitt identified the best location to drill the hole, off the coast of Hawaii, but the project was canceled by Congress because of cost overruns and poor management.

In the 1960s, Shor helped create the California Sea Grant program, headquartered at Scripps, serving as its manager from 1969 to 1973.

George Gershon Shor Jr. was born June 8, 1923, in New York City. He attended Caltech, where he was part of a program that trained students to be sailors. Upon his graduation in 1944 with a degree in mechanical engineering, he served as an electronics and communications officer on a Navy troop ship in the Pacific. He remained in the Naval Reserve until his retirement as a commander in 1983.

After the war, he returned to Caltech for graduate work in geophysics, then joined Seismic Explorations Inc. in Houston, for which he prospected for oil in New Mexico and West Texas. In 1951, he returned to Caltech to do graduate study with earthquake expert Charles Richter, receiving his degree in 1954.

After his retirement from Scripps in 1991, he developed an interest in bamboo as a structural material for flooring, furniture and other applications. He served as president of the American Bamboo Society for two years and helped establish the Southern California chapter of the organization.

Shor is survived by his wife of 59 years, Elizabeth Noble Shor; two sons, Alexander of Honolulu and Donald of Dixon, Calif.; a daughter, Carolyn Large of Dixon; and seven grandchildren.

Deceased--J. Lamar Worzel

J. Lamar Worzel
February 21st, 1919 to December 26th, 2009

"J. Lamar Worzel, Expert on Ocean’s Depths, Dies at 89"

by

Dennis Hevesi

January 26th, 2009

The New York Times

J. Lamar Worzel, an ocean geophysicist and a designer of jury-rigged devices that gave an early view of the peaks and troughs of the deep sea and revealed the way sound flows below the waves, died Dec. 26 at his home in Wilmington, N.C. He was 89.

The cause was a heart attack, his daughter, Sandra Browne, said.

Over a 40-year career, Dr. Worzel logged untold nautical miles around the globe, most often aboard the black-hulled, three-masted research schooner Vema, and slipped thousands of fathoms below the surface on Navy submarines.

His research provided the underpinnings for one of the most successful of American espionage efforts in the cold war, eavesdropping on the sounds made by Soviet submarines.

Working with his mentor, Maurice Ewing, the founder of the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory of Columbia University, Dr. Worzel made significant advances in the days when the deep sea remained largely uncharted scientific territory.

Dr. Ewing had been Dr. Worzel's professor at Lehigh University in the late 1930s, and they worked together — along with a bevy of other Ewing students — first at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in Massachusetts and, starting in 1948, at what was originally called the Lamont Geological Observatory. The president of Columbia at the time, Dwight D. Eisenhower, had lured them to open their own observatory at an estate overlooking the Hudson River in Palisades, N.J.

With Dr. Ewing brainstorming and Dr. Worzel leading the designers, the team slapped together precursors of more precisely manufactured measuring devices: a camera to take photos thousands of feet below the ocean’s surface, with a coffee-can lid for a flash reflector and a thick, diner-style drinking glass as its casing; a seismograph timed by a modified railroad pocket watch; an oscillograph, to record electrical changes, run by a motor from a toy electric train.

"To detonate explosions under deep-sea pressures up to 8,000 pounds per square inch, presumed impossible by experts, Worzel carefully packed explosives into inner tubes, then figured out how to make them go off by adapting paper caps from toy cowboy revolvers," Kevin Krajick, the senior science writer at the Lamont-Doherty observatory, said on Wednesday.

Frank Press, a former president of the National Academy of Sciences, said that among other accomplishments, Drs. Worzel and Ewing "established that the sea floor was not a former continent, but part of an original ocean basin."

"The old theory," explained Dr. Press, a co-author of the geology textbook "Understanding Earth," "was that the sea floor was an ancient continent that sank millions of years ago." But measurements taken by Drs. Worzel and Ewing determined that the crust beneath the sea floor was much thinner and had other different physical properties than the crust beneath continents.

"Other scientists used their work to explain tectonic plates and continental drift," Dr. Press said.

Measurements made by the Ewing-Worzel team also found "shadow zones" — underwater regions where specific combinations of temperature and pressure blocked out sound waves, including sonar from surface vessels, enabling submarines to hide.

Their work also revealed "deep sound channels" — narrow zones about 3,000 feet down that transmit low-frequency sounds over thousands of miles. In 1960, for example, the team dropped a depth charge into waters off Australia. The sound waves were detected 12,000 miles away and 223 minutes later, in Bermuda.

"This discovery became the basis of the Navy’s vast cold war Sofar — sound fixing and ranging — program and its successors," Mr. Krajick said, "secret weapons that girded the world with underwater listening devices to identify and track Soviet subs."

John Lamar Worzel was born on Staten Island on Feb. 21, 1919, the son of Howard and Mary Wilson Worzel. He graduated from Lehigh in 1940 and soon joined Dr. Ewing's team at Woods Hole. He received a master's degree in geophysics from Columbia in 1949 and a doctorate there a year later.

Besides his daughter, Dr. Worzel is survived by his wife of 67 years, the former Dorothy Crary; three sons, Howard, Richard and William; eight grandchildren; and two great-grandchildren.

When Dr. Ewing became director of the Lamont observatory in 1948, he chose Dr. Worzel as his deputy. Much of their work was financed by the Navy. In the late '60s, with student protests challenging military research on college campuses, they opened the Palisades Geophysical Institute, to continue classified Navy research. While serving as the institute’s president, Dr. Worzel maintained his academic posts.

In 1972, Drs. Worzel and Ewing left Columbia for the University of Texas. When Dr. Ewing died, two years later, Dr. Worzel succeeded him as director of the university's Institute of Geophysics.

At Columbia, Dr. Worzel acquired a series of research vessels, including the Vema, then took them to sea.

In 1951, he led an expedition during which an echo sounder discovered a mountain more than a mile below the surface, 200 miles off Cape Cod. Four years later, magnetic readings during another expedition found a volcano below the sea floor, 100 miles east of the New Jersey coast. And four years later, on another voyage, four snail-like creatures that until then were believed to have been extinct for 300 million years were brought up alive from a depth of 18,000 feet, 200 miles west of Peru.

"Eighty percent of the Earth's surface is water," Dr. Worzel said in 1955. "We're just beginning to find out what that portion is really about."

Deceased--Victor Vacquier Sr.

Victor Vacquier Sr.
October 13th, 1907 to January 11th, 2009

"Victor Vacquier Sr. dies at 101; geophysicist was a master of magnetics"

By

Thomas H. Maugh II

January 24th, 2009

Los Angeles Times

Victor Vacquier Sr., a Scripps Institution of Oceanography geophysicist who developed key instruments for mapping the Earth's magnetic fields and whose research provided a strong experimental foundation for the now widely accepted theory of plate tectonics, died of pneumonia Jan. 11 in La Jolla. He was 101.

An academic rarity who became a full professor without ever earning a doctoral degree, Vacquier was a master of magnetics, developing key instruments for the military and then adapting them for use in research.

As an electrical engineer at Gulf Research Laboratories in the 1930s, Vacquier invented the flux magnetometer, a new tool for detecting magnetic fields.

With the outbreak of World War II, he went to the Airborne Instruments Laboratory at Columbia University to oversee testing of the device. Preliminary experiments showed that it could successfully identify a submerged submarine.

After that demonstration, he went to the Lighter-Than-Air Naval Headquarters in New Jersey, where the magnetometer was installed in an R3 blimp. The magnetometer worked, but the blimp didn't -- often failing to make headway or even moving backward relative to the ground because of winds. After 200 hours of airborne testing, Vacquier convinced the Navy that the device would work much better in a PBY Catalina flying boat.

From 1944 to 1953, he worked at Sperry Gyroscope Inc., where he developed the Mark 19 and Mark 23 gyrocompasses that became standard equipment on Navy ships for identifying true north.

He spent the next four years at the New Mexico Institute of Mining and Technology, where he developed a method to use electrical conductivity to search for ground water in arid regions.

Vacquier joined Scripps in 1957 to direct its geomagnetics program, in which magnetometers are towed behind ships to measure the magnetic fields imprinted on the sea floor.

His biggest discovery was the recognition that the distinctive magnetic pattern of the sea floor across a broad section of the Pacific Ocean was offset by 776 miles across a fracture zone. That finding proved to be a major factor in the rapid acceptance in the 1960s of the theory of plate tectonics, which says that major plates of the Earth's surface are moving with respect to each other.

In the 1960s, Vacquier took over the Scripps program for measuring heat flow through the sea floor. He found evidence of elevated heat flow at the crest of the Mid-Atlantic Range and the Central Indian Ridge. These discoveries provided experimental support for the idea of sea-floor spreading -- in which tectonic plates slowly separate, bringing molten rock, and heat, to the Earth's surface -- another aspect of plate tectonics.

Vacquier was born Oct. 13, 1907, in St. Petersburg, Russia. In 1920, after the Russian revolution, he and his family escaped to Helsinki, crossing the frozen Gulf of Finland in a one-horse sleigh. The family lived in France until he and his mother immigrated to the United States in 1923.

He earned a bachelor's degree in electrical engineering at the University of Wisconsin in 1927 and a master's degree in physics in 1929.

Vacquier had more than 50 publications and 18 patents, and received a number of major prizes for his inventions.

He is survived by his wife, Mihoko; a son, Victor D. Vacquier, a biologist at Scripps; four grandchildren; and four great-grandchildren.

Deceased--George W. Housner

George W. Housner
December 9th, 1910 to November 10th, 2008

"George W. Housner dies at 97; Caltech professor emeritus was called the father of earthquake engineering"

He developed the mathematical framework to understand quake vibrations, leading to the implementation of more rigorous building standards nationwide.

by

John Johnson Jr.

November 15th, 2008

Los Angeles Times

George W. Housner, who pioneered the modern field of earthquake engineering, developing the most complete mathematical system to analyze the effects of ground shaking on structures, has died. He was 97.

Housner, the Braun professor emeritus of engineering at Caltech, died of natural causes Monday at a Pasadena rest home.

His interest in earthquake engineering was spurred by the March 10, 1933, earthquake in Long Beach, which was later estimated at magnitude 6.3. Brick buildings with unreinforced masonry walls, including many school buildings, failed catastrophically. Although 115 people were killed, the number of deaths would have been even higher if the quake, which hit at 5:55 p.m., had struck during school hours.

According to Tom Heaton, professor of engineering seismology at Caltech and a former colleague of Housner's, the field of earthquake engineering hardly existed at the time.

"Nothing was mentioned in engineering books regarding designing to resist earthquakes," Housner told The Times in a 1999 interview.

At the most, Heaton said, engineers considered only how a building would fare in a quake by calculating the force of the pushing on it. It took Housner to realize that an earthquake "is not static" but sets off vibrations throughout the entire structure that could bring it down. Housner developed the mathematical framework to understand those vibrations, which led to the implementation of more rigorous building standards nationwide, Heaton said.

To many in the field today, Housner is known as the father of earthquake engineering, a vigorous subdiscipline of civil engineering.

"George was a man of great intellect, which he used diligently to reduce the impact of earthquakes on our society," Heaton said. "He was one of those people who changed our world."

John Hall, professor of civil engineering at Caltech, said Housner ranks with the greatest minds in engineering history. "He could look at a problem no one had ever thought about before and come up with a way to apply basic principles to find a practical solution."

Born Dec. 9, 1910, in Saginaw, Mich., Housner earned a bachelor's degree in structural engineering at the University of Michigan.

Arriving at Caltech only months after the Long Beach quake, Housner obtained his master's and doctorate there, studying under Romeo Martel, who had done some of the earliest work in trying to understand how earthquakes affected buildings.

After graduating from Caltech, Housner went to work for the Army Corps of Engineers, then advised the Army Air Forces during World War II. His work helped bomber pilots improve their success in attacking bridges.

He also devised a plan to counter the barrage balloons that Axis armies sent aloft over Europe's vulnerable oil fields to interfere with enemy aircraft. Bomber pilots were afraid to attack the oil fields for fear the wires attached to the balloons would slice through their wings. According to Hall, Housner's calculations that the wires might cut into the wings but would not slice all the way through, gave the Army Air Forces the confidence to make the attacks.

Examination of planes returning from bombing runs proved Housner correct. The wings were grooved, but intact.

In 1945, Housner was given the Distinguished Civilian Service Award by the U.S. War Department in recognition of his contributions to the war effort.

After the war, Housner returned to Caltech as an assistant professor of applied mechanics. He later became the Braun professor before retiring in 1981. In 2006, he was named a Distinguished Alumnus, the highest honor the institute can bestow on graduates.

Housner's interest in seismic engineering continued after the war; he chaired a National Academies of Sciences committee looking into the damage from the 1964 Alaska earthquake.

He also was instrumental in the design of California's statewide water storage and transportation system. His earthquake engineering techniques were used to strengthen dozens of dams and aqueducts built throughout California, a system that ranks high among the most ambitious engineering efforts in history.

After the 1989 Loma Prieta quake in Northern California, Gov. George Deukmejian asked Housner to chair the board investigating the collapse of freeways and bridges.

Housner was elected to the National Academy of Sciences in 1972 and became a founding member of the Earthquake Engineering Research Institute. A medal in Housner's name is awarded each year by the organization.

He also was instrumental in the formation of the International Assn. for Earthquake Engineering, as well as Caltech's Earthquake Research Affiliates.

In 1981, Housner received the Harry Fielding Reid Medal of the Seismological Society of America. Previous winners included Charles Richter, creator of the Richter scale that measures earthquake severity.

In a 1988 White House ceremony, President Reagan gave Housner the National Medal of Science, recognizing "his profound and decisive influence on the development of earthquake engineering worldwide. His research contributions have guided the development of earthquake engineering and have had an important impact on other major disciplines."

According to Heaton, even after his retirement, Housner continued to show up each day at his Caltech office. Heaton recalled a time in the late 1990s when he was about to give a lecture on a particularly thorny topic and was having trouble mastering it.

"George was walking by my office," Heaton said, "so I asked his advice."

"It's been a long time since I thought about that," Housner said, and walked off.

"Five minutes later, he came back, picked up the chalk and wrote out the whole answer," Heaton said. "I thought, 'Wow.' He was 88 at the time."

Housner never married. He will be buried at Mountain View Cemetery in Altadena.

Rachel Prud'homme interviewed George Housner in 1984.

Interview in 1984 with George W. Housner, Carl F. Braun Professor of Engineering emeritus. BS, University of Michigan in civil engineering, 1933. MS Caltech, 1934. Interest in earthquake engineering after 1933 Long Beach earthquake; 1934-39, designed schools, bridges, and dams in Los Angeles; returned to Caltech for PhD (1941) with R. R. Martel. Worked for Corps of Engineers in Los Angeles, protecting aircraft industry from possible wartime attack. Adviser to the air force in North Africa and Italy during the war. Joined Caltech faculty 1945 as asst. prof. of applied mechanics; buildup of Engineering and Applied Science Division under chairman Fred Lindvall. Comments on differences between seismologists and earthquake engineers. Recalls origins of earthquake engineering at Caltech under Martel. Chairs engineering committee on 1964 Alaska quake. With Paul Jennings, consults on earthquake design for buildings in downtown Los Angeles. Founding of Earthquake Engineering Research Institute [EERI]. Comments on liquefaction in 1964 Niigata earthquake. Recalls Theodor von Kármán’s part in designing pumps for Colorado River Aqueduct. Recalls his own involvement in Feather River Project in 1950s as president of EERI, and Ralph Nader’s misrepresentation of its earthquake safety. Comments on engineering improvements in aftermath of 1971 San Fernando earthquake. Visits China in 1978 as member of delegation on earthquake engineering. Comments on superiority of Japanese earthquake preparedness. Founding of International Association for Earthquake Engineering and Caltech Earthquake Research Affiliates. Establishment with NSF funding of a Committee on Natural Hazards, including wind damage. Sen. Alan Cranston’s part in getting NSF money in 1974 for earthquake research. Comments on his work at Palomar Observatory and Union Bank Building. Comments on demolition of Caltech’s Throop Hall following San Fernando quake, on future of engineering education, and on his stint as chairman of the faculty. Comments on Ed Simmons, inventor of a strain gauge, Simmons’s legal battle with Caltech, and Caltech’s patent policy.

Interview

Selected Earthquake Engineering Papers of George W Housner: Civil Engineering Classics

by

G. W. Housner

ISBN-10: 0872627667
ISBN-13: 978-0872627666

This is a new volume in the ASCE series "Engineering Classics", which presents selected papers of lasting importance by eminent engineers who have made outstanding contributions to their field. Sponsored by the Structural Division of the ASCE, this volume collects a number of key papers on earthquake engineering by George W. Housner, who more than any other person has been responsible for the remarkable development of this subject during the past fifty years. Included here are the basic research papers which form the scientific background for modern earthquake design. They discuss such topics as: the characteristics of strong earthquake ground motion; the response of structures to earthquakes; the development of response spectrum techniques; and, the formulation of design spectrum. Besides presenting his fundamental research papers, other papers are also included on such subjects as: dynamic tests of structures, seismic zoning problems, response of fluid systems to earthquake excitation, and special problems of critical structures such as dams and nuclear power plants. The volume thus not only presents much material of historical interest, but it is virtually a textbook on modern earthquake engineering.

Deceased--John W. Miles

John W. Miles
1920 to October 20th, 2008

Wednesday, October 22, 2008

Obituary Notice:

Distinguished Scientist and Professor: John W. Miles

Scripps geophysicist and professor made fundamental contributions to understanding how wind energy transfers to waves

Scripps Institution of Oceanography/UC San Diego

John W. Miles, renowned scientist and research professor emeritus of applied mechanics and geophysics at Scripps Institution of Oceanography, UC, San Diego, died Oct. 20, 2008, in Santa Barbara, Calif., following a stroke. He was 87 years old. Miles had been at Scripps since 1964 as a researcher and professor in the Cecil H. and Ida M. Green Institute of Geophysics and Planetary Physics (IGPP) and also served as vice chancellor for academic affairs at UC San Diego from 1980 to 1983.

Miles was well regarded for his pioneering work in theoretical fluid mechanics and in 1957 proposed a wind-wave growth model, a theory he continued to refine until late in his career. His theoretical model is considered one of the cornerstones for the current generation of numerical wave prediction models, and a major contribution to the field of ocean weather forecasting and wave dynamics. In 2003, researchers at Johns Hopkins University and UC Irvine provided the first experimental measurements supporting important aspects of Miles' theory.

Miles devoted the first 20 years of his research to electrical and aeronautical engineering. When he joined Scripps, he turned his mathematical abilities to geophysical fluid dynamics and made numerous contributions to all aspects of fluid dynamics, including supersonic flow, ocean tides, the stability of currents and water waves and their nonlinear interactions, along with extensive work in the application of mathematical methodology.

"John was a very generous colleague with a great love for research and an immense appetite for work", said Rick Salmon, Scripps professor of oceanography and colleague of Miles.

Miles was born in Cincinnati, Ohio, in 1920 and received his B.S. in 1942, M.S. in 1943, and A.E. and Ph.D. in 1944, all from the California Institute of Technology. During World War II, he worked at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Radiation Laboratory and for Lockheed Aircraft Corporation, followed by an appointment as professor of engineering and geophysics at UCLA from 1945 to 1961.

In addition to his vice chancellorship at UC San Diego, he also served as chairman of the Academic Senate from 1977 to 1978 and chairman of the Applied Mechanics and Engineering Sciences Department from 1968 to 1972.

Although he explored a world of theoretical chaos, his life was the essence of order. He worked in his office six days a week, nearly 12 hours a day, on a strict schedule for every activity from student conferences to daily bicycle rides. Miles was an avid swimmer - in the ocean in his younger years, and later in at the UC San Diego Canyonview Pool where he was often spotted riding to on his bicycle. Miles also enjoyed hiking and over the course of his annual summer vacations completed the Pacific Crest Trail, which spans the entire U.S. west coast from the Mexican to Canadian borders,

Miles retired from Scripps in the mid-1980s and soon after returned to active duty to supervise graduate student research. Whether officially retired or not, he maintained a rigorous research and publication schedule throughout his academic career, even during times of heavy administrative responsibilities.

"John was known for his generous support of young people who worked with him, a number of whom have gone on to very successful careers in academia and research," said Ken Melville, professor of oceanography at Scripps and former postdoctoral researcher with Miles. "The example John set would influence you for the rest of your career."

In 1990 he was feted with an international symposium on fluid mechanics at Scripps, in recognition of his contributions to science and academia. He has received several prestigious awards, including the Timoshenko Medal of the American Society of Mechanical Engineers in 1982, and was designated the Otto Laporte Lecturer by the American Physical Society in 1983. He was elected a member of the National Academy of Sciences in 1979.

Miles' research productivity was legendary, with more than 400 publications over his working 60-year career. He served as associate editor of the Journal of Fluid Mechanics and editor/coeditor of several other scientific journals, covering U.S. and foreign research in fluid mechanics, applied mechanics and mathematical analyses.

He was a longtime resident of La Jolla, Calif., and is survived by three daughters, Patsy Fiske of Santa Barbara, Calif., Ann Leslie Albanese of Solvang, Calif. and Diana Jose of San Diego, Calif. At his request there will be no memorial services. His ashes will be scattered at sea.

[Thanks to stringer Tim.]

Deceased--Geoff Ballard

Geoff Ballard
October 16th, 1932 to August 2nd, 2008

Perhaps in time his name and association with fuel cells will be more popular.

"Geoff Ballard, 75; geophysicist expanded use of fuel cells"

by

Thomas H. Maugh II

August 11th, 2008

Los Angeles Times

Geoff Ballard, the Canadian entrepreneur who transformed pollution-free fuel cells from an exotic power source used in the space program to an everyday engine used in industry, buses and, perhaps soon, in cars, died Aug. 2 at Lions Gate Hospital in Vancouver from complications of liver disease. He was 75.

In 1999, Time magazine named Ballard a "Hero of the Planet" for his efforts to reduce pollution in cities by getting fuel cells into cars -- an effort that has borne little fruit yet, but that is receiving renewed emphasis because of the rising price of gasoline.

Ballard's name "will forever be associated with this company's fuel-cell products, which are being deployed as an energy source for applications in a growing number of important global markets," said John Sheridan, president and chief executive of Ballard Power Systems.

A geophysicist by training, Ballard spent the first years of his career working for the U.S. Army, specializing initially in microwave communications and later in ice physics. In the latter role, he studied ways to hide fuel tanks for U.S. bombers in Greenland's ice fields.

When the energy crisis hit the United States in 1974, Ballard was chosen to lead the newly created Federal Energy Conservation Research program.

Stymied by Congress' refusal to provide what he considered adequate funding, he quit and set out on his own, buying a decrepit Arizona motel for $2,000 and turning it into a research laboratory. He initially tried to create a lithium battery that could be used instead of an internal-combustion motor in cars, but that effort led him into bankruptcy.

The company moved to Vancouver when it got a contract to provide a lithium battery for a submarine owned by Canadian industrialist John Horton, who agreed to provide funding for the company.

In 1983, Ballard teamed up with engineer Paul Howard and electrochemist Keith Prater to try to develop fuel cells, getting seed money from the Canadian military.

Conceptually, fuel cells are simple. Hydrogen and oxygen are combined in the presence of a catalyst to produce electricity, with the only waste product being water.

The concept for the technology was developed in the 1830s by British scientist Sir William Grove, but implementation had been slow and fuel cells proved to be either bulky and inefficient or very expensive.

The three entrepreneurs worked tirelessly to improve the efficiency of existing fuel cells and reduce their size and cost.

A breakthrough moment for the company came in summer 1989 while Ballard was relaxing in a spa at the Hollyburn Country Club in Vancouver with a British Columbia official. Ballard convinced the official that his company could produce a municipal bus that would run on hydrogen and emit only water vapor.

"Can you get me a green photo op?" Ballard later recalled the official asking him.

Four years later, officers of Ballard Power gathered with Canadian officials to ceremonially sip water collected from the tailpipe of the $4.2-million bus.

Eventually, Daimler AG and Ford Motor Co. bought into Ballard, investing more than $750 million in development of the technology. This year, Ballard sold the company's automotive fuel-cell division to the two auto manufacturers for nearly $100 million.

One of the most promising projects to come out of the research was a fleet of 60 fuel-cell-powered buses that have been operating for six years in Germany, Japan, Singapore and the United States. The buses produce no emissions and are 30% more fuel-efficient than diesel buses.

Ballard Power has chosen to concentrate its efforts on fuel cells for use indoors -- such as in forklifts -- where emissions are a bigger problem and a pricier power source is feasible.

Ballard himself, meanwhile, recognized that fuel-cell cars could never be viable unless a distribution system could be established for hydrogen. In 1999, he started General Hydrogen to explore ways to manufacture and market the fuel. That company was bought last year by Plug Power Inc. for $10 million.

Given current technologies, fuel cells are not yet an optimum solution. Hydrogen is generally manufactured by an electrolysis process powered by burning fossil fuels. The net effect of implementing fuel-cell cars would thus be a transfer of emissions from cities to remote power plants -- not necessarily a bad idea, Ballard argued.

To overcome the pollution problem, Ballard in his later years argued that nuclear energy should be used to generate hydrogen.

An estimated 200 fuel-cell-powered cars running on hydrogen are now operating on California roads, and car companies hope to increase that number in the next few years. But major problems remain, including the high cost of the technology and the lack of an infrastructure for delivering hydrogen to consumers.

At least three stations that offer hydrogen to commercial customers are operating in Los Angeles, and Royal Dutch Shell recently upgraded a service station in West L.A. to provide hydrogen to consumers.

Geoffrey E. H. Ballard was born Oct. 16, 1932, in Niagara Falls, Canada. He studied at Queen's University in Kingston, Canada, then received his doctorate in earth sciences from Washington University in St. Louis.

He fully retired two years ago because of health problems.

Ballard is survived by his wife of 52 years, Shelagh; and three sons, Curtis, Mark and Edward.