Five of Automation’s Biggest Hits

By Walt Boyes, Editor in Chief

Every year, the members of the Process Automation Hall of Fame vote into the Hall just a few of their peers. This year’s class includes Hans D. Baumann, Renzo Dallimonti, J. Patrick Kennedy, Carroll Ryskamp and Cecil L. Smith.

In 1997, this magazine profiled Renzo Dallimonti with the headline, “The Best Way to Predict the Future Is to Create It.” That headline could easily fit any of these five men. Each has made an enormous contribution to the field of automation.

View 2009 Hall of Fame Slide Show

Hans Baumann, Renaissance Man

In his career, Hans D. Baumann has done many things and done them all well. Starting out as an industrial engineer in his native Germany, Baumann worked in Germany and France. He studied in the United States, acquiring a doctorate in mechanical engineering from Columbia Pacific University. Baumann has personally designed or directed the development of over 30 valve lines, including the famous “CAMFLEX” valve. He is credited with numerous patents and papers in addition to co-authoring seven handbooks on valves, instrumentation and noise.

“My first involvement in automation was in 1955, designing control valves for Siemens,” he says. “Over the past fifty-plus years, I have thoroughly enjoyed being part of the international community of control experts and being able to disseminate U.S. technology throughout my involvement on the international standards committees.”

Baumann has worked for many different control valve manufacturers, including  Emerson Process Management’s Fisher Controls—from which he retired in 2000.

But control valves aren’t Baumann’s only passions. In 2002, he published The Ideal Enterprise, a book on business efficiency. Baumann’s latest book is Building Lean Companies: How to Keep Companies Profitable as they Grow. Versatile, Baumann has also written a history of the last days of WWII entitled, Hitler’s Fate: The Final Story.

Baumann serves as an advisor to the dean of the University of New Hampshire School of Business, is the treasurer of the Palm Beach Round Table and a director of the Palm Beach Opera.

“Automation is still a challenging area of technology,” he says, after fifty years in the field. “I look for wireless to be a game changer, even acknowledging the security risk involved.”

Baumann continues to lecture internationally. “I like to pass on my experience and knowledge to the younger generation,” he says.

Renzo Dallimonti, Futurist

Dallimonti’s repeated phrase, “The best way to predict the future is to create it,” defines his career at Honeywell. In many ways, the way we do automation in 2009 is because that’s the way Renzo Dallimonti said we should.

In 1969, Dallimonti says, “I said to my manager, ‘Do you want us to really push the level of technology and keep an open mind to anything?’”

From 1969 to 1975, Dallimonti led what was then called Honeywell’s Project 72. “The name Project 72,” Dallimonti recalls, “came from the hope that by 1972 we could begin showing some of these products.”

It was 1975 before he unveiled the TDC2000—a product with little competition for years.

Dallimonti has been involved in instrumentation and control his entire career, from doing instrumentation on the Manhattan Project at Oak Ridge, Tenn., to instrumentation systems for General Electric, to Brown Instruments, which became Honeywell. He stayed at Honeywell for 38 years.

Even though he’s been retired since 1986, Dallimonti is still thinking about the future of automation.

He calls his concept the “Future Horizon Plant.”

“The automation technology that already exists today is sufficient to improve plant productivity in the process industries for the next decade,” he says. “The most pressing need now is not more scientific breakthroughs, but more perceptive visions of how best to utilize the productivity tools already commercially available."

You can see more of Dallimonti’s vision at www.controlglobal.com/0902_HOF.html

Pat Kennedy, Entrepreneur

J. Patrick Kennedy is responsible for the creation of the modern data historian, Pi, which is used by more plants than any other in the world. “We concentrate on this one thing that we know how to do,” he says, “and we resist all the opportunities to expand out of our niche.”

Kennedy didn’t start in software. A graduate of the University of Kansas with a doctorate in chemical engineering, Kennedy worked for Shell Chemical Company before joining what was then Taylor Instruments (now ABB).

“I was hired to work in the Digital Systems Group of Taylor in 1973 and and met people like John Ziegler,” he says. As an applications consultant at Taylor, Kennedy wrote prophetically about how the DCS would develop. He also became fascinated with advanced process control.