Early Tuesday morning on May 23rd 2000, David Laverty passed away peacefully at his home in Norwell, Massachusetts. He is survived by his wife, Carol, and his three sons, Mark, Tom, and Michael. Our thoughts are with him and we will miss him very much.

Born too many years ago in Omaha, Nebraska, but grew up in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania through my high-school years.  Then went to Drexel Institute of Technology (now Drexel University) in Philadelphia to study metallurgical engineering.  After graduation, moved to Cleveland, Ohio to work for Thompson Products (now TRW) and did my graduate studies in Metallurgy and Materials Engineering at Case Institute of Technology (now Case Western Reserve University) in Cleveland.  How come every time I left an organization, it changed its name?  Also, after all those years studying metallurgy, the one simple question I have the most trouble answering in "what is a metal?".

It was in Cleveland that I met Carol, got married, and we had our first two children, Mark and Tom.  So Mark was really born in Cleveland, Ohio, even though he might not be able to keep this fact straight (see his page on this web site).   Michael, our third son, was born in 1970 after a subsequent move to the Boston area.

At TRW (actually changed its name while I was still there), I worked in materials development, primarily for aerospace applications.  Among other things, I worked on some of the porous metal electrodes of the fuel cells used in some of the Apollo missions.  I remember the date of July 20, 1969 when the first man landed on the moon.  It represented a culmination of much of the aerospace materials work that I was involved in.  It was also the day I accepted a job at Brunswick Corporation to leave the primarily aerospace emphasis of my materials development work for a more commercially oriented enterprise.

Brunswick, perhaps best known for bowling balls, also had a significant metals-oriented product line.  It had a medical division that developed the disposable hypodermic needle.  This was a development brought about by a unique method of making fine stainless steel tubing inexpensively enough to allow the product to be disposed of after one use.  Variations on this metal fabrication technology allowed the development of fine stainless steel fibers that were used for a variety of applications ranging from static elimination in carpets and surgeon gowns to industrial filtration applications.  Brunswick also has a Defense Division, and we found that these fine stainless steel fibers would absorb radar and allow military camouflage that incorporated these fibers to hide metal objects such as tanks and trucks from radar detection.  Brunswick subsequently  produced such modernized camouflage for the Army.

It was at Brunswick where I became less of a materials engineering specialist and more of a technical generalist.  I got involved in the overall planning of research and development activities and integrating them with the objectives and business plans of the company.  This led to my current activities as a consulting engineer engaged primarily with the marketing aspects of new products.  The main questions I now deal with concern what attributes a new product must have to be competitive in the market place and how such products can best be introduced to the market.  The answers to these questions are often as elusive as a satisfactory definition of what a metal is.