President's Message

Abstract

Recently, I was working on an electrical safety issue and came upon an interesting article [Ref 1]. The author describes some research performed from 1936 to 1939 by Baron Whitaker, an electrical engineer at Underwriters Laboratories. Whitaker performed experiments on humans and animals to characterize the injuries that result from electric shock and determine the equipment properties that are needed for safety. The author asserts that this research still stands today and laments that “we don’t do much research anymore,” but instead develop standards based on the “Bunch Of Guys Sitting Around Talking” (BOGSAT) process.