Saddler Cites Terman As A Legend In His Time
By Ivan Saddler  From SMEC Vintage Electrics Vol. #3, Issue #1 1991 ( Now SMECC )

Ed Sharpe the editor of this journal asked me for my recollections of Fred Terman. At the University of Texas El Paso (UTEP) the electrical engineering classes were small by today's standards. My class (1950) had 33 members. Our bible was a text titled Radio Engineering. The author was Frederick Emmons Terman.

Today I used the modem in my computer to determine dates of publication, number of editions, etc. of this tome. A book of 1078 pages is really a tome. I did this research from a room in my home using the telephone line and a responding system called CARL at Arizona State University (ASU). CARL is an acronym for Colorado Alliance of Research Libraries. ASU and other research libraries have installed an interactive publication research system operated over telephone lines. This information gives a sense of the tremendous strides made in communications and electronics since the late 1940's. In almost every electronics field Dr. Terman was influential.

The ASU library has a copy of what I believe is the last edition of this seminal work. It is the fourth edition published in 1955. By that year McGraw Hill the publisher had retitled the text to Electronic and Radio Engineering in recognition of the limitations implied by "radio." The listing of the book showed that Dr. Terman had assistance from Arthur Helliwel and others. I’m not certain what that implies.

One of the pleasures and a responsibility of teachers is the potential influence they have on future generations. If immortality is the influence left on those who come after them, Frederick Emmons Terman is immortal.