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BRUCE G. JOHNSTON
1905-1989
BY LYNN S. BEEDLE
B RUCE G. JOHNSTON, a worId-renowned authority on the
behavior and design of steel structural members and frames,
died on October Il. 1989, in Tucson, Arizona, two days
before his eighty-fourth birthday. He directed early research
work on torsion of beams, behavior of semirigid connections,
plastic design of steel frames, and the inelastic strength of
beams and columns. In the field of plastic design, he pointed
research toward the development of specification requirements
that were instrumental in its acceptance as a design tool.
Dr. Johnston developed the postwar research program in
structures at the Fritz Engineering Laboratory, Lehigh
University. He was a leading figure in the organization of
the Structural Stability Research Council.
Dr. Johnston was born in Detroit, Michigan, on October
13, 1905. He married Ruth Barker in August 1939, and
they had three children: Sterling, Carol, and David. His
father was a structural engineer and a specialist in the planning
of construction and erection of large bridges. Dr. Johnston
spent his early youth in such widely separated places as
Ontario, Florida, North Carolina, and Kansas. His four
years of high school were spent successively in Colorado
Utah, Missouri, and Kansas.
In 1925 he completed his first year at Kansas City Junior
College, and he wrote of that experience:
163
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MEMORIAL TRIBUTES
My one year in the class of '25 of KCKJC and the prior year in
KCKHS were the most influential and inspirational school years of
my life. Under the influence of such teachers as Christine Wenrich
I found for the first time a real challenge in studies. The fundamentals
of English usage and the basics in mathematics were invaluable
preparation for later work.
In the spring of 1925, after much mental floundering, my goals
narrowed to civil engineering. This was the field in which my father,
self-taught, had found such a satisfying career. In the summer of
1925, I went to the University of Illinois.
In 1927 he worked as a testing inspector on the Coolidge
Dam in Arizona. In 1928 he returned to the University of
Illinois, from which he graduated in 1930 with a B.S. in
civil engineering. Upon his graduation from Illinois, he
received the Tra 0. Baker First Place Award in Civil Engineering.
His two earlier years of work on the Coolidge Dam in
Arizona had turned his interests toward concrete, and in
1930 with graduation pending from the University of Illinois,
he sought and found an opening in the field of concrete
design with the Roberts and Schaefer Engineering Company
of Chicago. He described the transition of his interest
from concrete to steel in the following way:
Shortly before graduation from Illinois, in talking with one of my
professors, the noted Hardy Cross, about this prospect, he said "Go
ahead and take the job, but you will end up in steel because you
have a mind that thinks in terms of steel." This forecast has always
amazed me as I had spoken but little to Professor Cross during the
previous term.
In 1932 came the opportunity to return to school (at Lehigh
University) to work on a research fellowship project on a topic suggested
by the Bethlehem Steel Corporation "structural beams in torsion."
This work, involving both the application of Prandlt's soap film analogy
and tests of actual members in torsion, resulted in the development
of formulas that eventually permitted the accurate calculation and
tabulation of St. Venant's torsion constant for rolled WE and I sections
in the AISC (American Institute of Steel Construction) Manual. Some
30 years later the advent of the electronic computer permitted the
improvement of these formulas by the difference-equation procedure
and their extension to channel and angle shapes.
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BRUCE G. JOHNSTON
165
He received his M.S. at Lehigh in 1934 and became an
instructor at Columbia University. He sought the advice of
his father, Sterling Johnston, as to needs in steel structures
research. Sterling had helped to plan the Quebec Bridge
construction many years before and had noted a problem
involving the dishing of thin pin-connected links. This led
to work on that topic, which later resulted in changes to
the AlSC specifications.
Columbia awarded Bruce Johnston the Ph.D. in 1938.
He describes his extra curricular experiences at this time
of his life as follows:
In 1937, to Africa on a decrepit freighter for a summer in French
Cameroun. Thirty-eight days enroute, with shore stops at Dakar,
Conakry, Monrovia, Abidjan, Accra, and Lagos. Learned how to
splice rope and make a sling from a sailor. Inland to Bafia, in high
grass country, to build and erect roof trusses for a church with a
crew of 125 Bulu people one generation removed from cannibalism.
Back to Columbia via German banana boat. As we neared Hamburg
the captain and crew went increasingly into their "Heil Hitler" form
of greeting. On the last night the captain gave a speech on German-
American friendship. It was 1937. Everywhere in Germany the people
were exhorted by posters to fear the dangers of world communism.
It was a prelude to devastation.
Met Ruth, an art teacher at Skidmore College in Saratoga Springs,
New York. 1938- received Ph.D. at Columbia and was offered an
Assistant Professorship and Assistant Directorship of Fritz Engineer-
ing Laboratory at Lehigh University. Moved to Bethlehem, Pennsylvania.
As assistant director, then associate director, and finally
as director, Dr. Johnston was in charge of structural research
programs at Lehigh's Fritz Engineering Laboratory from
1938 until 1950, except for a two-year interruption during
World War lI while he was first a design engineer for the
U.S. Navy Bureau of Yards and Docks and then engaged in
the study of vibration and shock-Ioad problems related to
the development of the proximity fuse and naval gun directors
at the Johns Hopkins Laboratory of Applied Physics.
In 1950 he accepted the call of the University of Michi-
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MEMORIAL TRIBUTES
gan and became professor of structural engineering. For
the ensuing eighteen years, he devoted his attention to
research, teaching, and professional activities.
In 1968 he retired and was named professor emeritus of
the University of Michigan. The following is from the memoir
adopted by the Regents:
In professional circles, Professor Johnston enjoyed the unique
distinction of presiding, at different times, over both the Structural
and the Engineering Mechanics divisions of the American Society of
Civil Engineers and of twice winning the Society's lames I. R. Croes
Medal. In addition to monographs, he wrote some sixty professional
papers, many of them an extraordinary seminal value. He visited
and lectured widely, furthermore lending his authoritative counsel
to innumerable engineering groups public and private, industrial,
military, and academic.
Professor Glen Berg, one of his Ph.D. students at Michi-
gan wrote, "He was one of the great persons in his field.
With characteristic generosity he shared his wisdom and
sound judgment freely with his colleagues".
Dr. Johnston then accepted a call from the University of
Arizona to lecture in civil engineering.
Early research at Lehigh in the 1940s stimulated his in-
terest in attaining a better understanding of metal column
behavior, a topic that thereafter became a primary thread
ot Interest.
One of my earliest projects at Lehigh concerned the behavior of
eccentrically loaded steel columns, a study sponsored by the Ameri-
can Institute of Steel Construction. In developing this work I discov-
ered, to my chagrin, that in spite of three university degrees, including
the Ph.D., I really understood next to nothing about the behavior of
metal columns. Much of the next 40 years involved attempts to
remedy this deficiency through diversified research projects at both
Lehigh and the University of Michigan as well as through active
participation in the work of the Column Research Council. These
studies were, in part, an expression of my deeply held feeling that a
University must not only fulfill its educational role of disseminating
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BRUCE G. JOHNSTON
167
knowledge, but must maintain a position on the creative forefront
of knowledge in the fields of industry in which its young graduates
go out to serve.
It was with this policy in mind that Dr. Johnston devel-
oped a strong graduate studies program in structural research
at Lehigh. He initiated research at Lehigh on the effect of
residual stress on column strength and conceived the impor-
tance of the strain-hardening modulus of structural steed in
relation to the behavior of steel columns. He also devel-
oped Lehigh's initial research program on plastic design,
directing it towards a delineation of design rules essential
to successful application in practice.
In 1944 Dr. Johnston assisted in the organization of the
Column Research Council (now known as the Structural
Stability Research Council). He served as its chairman from
1956 to 1962. He has been editor and part author of the
successive editions of the council's Guide to Design Criteria
for Metal Compression Members, more conveniently known as
the CRC Guide. Ins 1960 the first edition provided backup
for important changes in the AlSC specifications. Through
his service on the Executive Committee, the council continued
to have his guidance. He received American Society of
Civil Engineers' (ASCE) Ernest E. Howard Award in 1974.
In the 1950s Dr. Johnston participated as a project supervisor
in studies of the effects of atomic blast during tests at Yucca
Flats, Nevada. He was in charge of the evaluation of test
results for one group of industrial and commercial buildings
under a contract with the Federal Civil Defense Administration.
During the 1960s and early 1970s, he was active as a
consultant to the Association of Iron and Steel Engineers,
assisting in the development of structural specifications for
steel mill ladIes, overhead traveling cranes, and mill build-
ing structures. He was a member of the Specification Advisory
Committee of the AlSC. From 1961 to 1963, he was a
member of the Civil Defense Pane} of the President's Sci-
ence Advisory Committee.
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MEMORIAL TRIBUTES
He was one of the 1969 charter steering group members
of the Joint Committee on Tall Buildings (now the Council
on Tall Buildings and Urban Habitat). He served as co-
chairman of its editorial committee.
He was coauthor of the Steel Design Manual published by
the U.S. Steel Corporation in 196S, and coauthored a beginning
text Basic Steel Design first published in 1974. In 1969 he
received the ASCE's highest award, that of honorary mem-
ber. In 1979 he was elected to the National Academy of
Engineering. In 1981 he received the "Alumni Honor Award
for Distinguished Service in Engineering" from the University
of Illinois.
Dr. Johnston was author or coauthor of more than seventy
papers on structural research. He has always tried to consider
both the values and limitations of theory and research on
the one hand, the problems of the practicing engineer on
the other, and how to bridge the gap between the two.
His retirement was a rich and rewarding time with his
family in a relationship that all admired. As his daughter,
Carol Snow, described in the memorial service to her father,
Dad's life work was as engineer and educator. In the academic
world, he was (as they say) "well published." But I want to share a
different instance of being published that also pleased him. In June
1981 in GolfDigest, his short poem "The Numbers Game" was published.
It goes:
When Ruth requests some household chore,
My age bears down at seventy-four.
But when I stand out on the tee,
I suddenly find I'm forty-three.
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Representative terms from entire chapter:
fritz engineering
