Page 157 - ISES SWC50

8.2 ISES Presidents 1980-1989

Harry Tabor

Harry Tabor (UK, Israel) was born in London, the UK in 1917. He received a
BSc in Applied Physics from the University of London in 1939. In 1949, David
Ben-Gurion, Israel’s first Prime Minister, invited Harry to move to Israel to create
the National Physical Laboratory (NPLI). While there, he invented the ‘selective
solar surface’ and was the ‘father’ of the solar collector industry in Israel. In
1961, together with Lucien Yehuda Bronicki, he developed the low-temperature
Organic Rankine Cycle turbine (the Ormat turbine). In 1981, he was awarded the
Figure 29: Harry Tabor, Farrington Daniels Award and on his 80th birthday, ISES published a selection of
President 1981-1983 his scientific papers. In 2014 at age 96, he received the President’s Prize for Life
Accomplishment, one of Israel’s most prestigious awards.

Wal Read

Wal Read (Australia) was a mechanical engineer who joined the Commonwealth
Scientific and Industrial Research Organization (CSIRO) in 1952. In 1956, he
became a principal research scientist working in the areas of solar domestic hot
water and desalination and for many years he led the Solar Energy Utilization
Group, which later became the Solar Energy Unit. He became very active in the
development of solar water heating systems, swimming pool heating, solar air
heating with rock bed storage, solar kiln timber drying, and, in particular, large
Figure 30: Wal Read, solar distillation projects. For several years he was the engineer responsible for
President 1981-1983 developments in industrial process heating in areas such as pasteurization and
bottle washing.

He became Secretary of the Australia-New Zealand Section of ISES in 1969 and Chairman in 1976–78. He
submitted the proposal to the section to consider holding the ISES SWC 1983 in Perth. He was also elected
to the ISES Board in 1976 and later joined the ISES Committee for Programs and International Activities,
becoming the Vice President of ISES in 1981. In 1986, he was awarded an Order of Australia for service
to science and solar energy. He was asked to take over the position of ISES Secretary/Treasurer and was
subsequently to carry out this important task for many years, along with maintaining the ISES News

William A. Beckman

Bill Beckman (USA) was very well known to ISES scientists and engineers as the
co-author (along with Jack Duffie) of Solar Energy Thermal Processes, probably
the most used solar basic engineering text of the period. Beckman joined the
University of Wisconsin-Madison as an Assistant Professor in 1963 and
remained there for the rest of his career. Prior to coming to the UW, he gained his
BS, MS, and PhD from the University of Michigan and worked for an automotive
manufacturer. He spent several summers at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory and
was a visiting scientist at CSIRO in Australia and Valbonne, France. He then
Figure 31: William
Beckman, President served as Chair of the Mechanical Engineering Department at UW from 1987 to
1985-1987 1991. Bill earned numerous other honours over the years, including being named
a Fulbright Scholar in 1977. He held an Ouweneel-Bascom Professor Emeritus
position continuously from 1981 to his retirement and retired in 2000.

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