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JOSEPH HENRY KEENAN
1900-1977
BY ASCHER H. SHAPIRO
OSEPH HENRY KEENAN, Prolessor Emeritus of Mechanical En-
gineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT),
former Head of the Department of Mechanical Engineering, and
Member of the National Academy of Engineering, died on July 17,
1977, after a three-year illness, during which time he had
steadfastly maintained an active personal and professional life.
Professor Keenan was born August 24, 1900, in Wilkes-Barre,
Pennsylvania. In 1922 he received from MIT the degree of Bachelor
of Science in naval architecture and marine engineering.
The course of his future professional career centered on the
deep structure of thermodynamics was in a sense set by his first
job, when, in 1922, he became a turbine design engineer with the
General Electric Company in Schenectady, New York. Here he first
became interested in the properties of steam, which necessitated
thorough grounding in the fundamentals of thermodynamics.
In 1922, he entered the academic world, there to remain, as
Assistant Professor of Mechanical Engineering at Stevens Institute
of Technology in Hoboken, New Jersey. At the invitation of Karl
Taylor Compton he came to MIT in 1934 as Associate Professor of
Mechanical Engineering and was promoted to Professor in 1939.
During the more than forty years he was associated with MIT,
Professor Keenan made a host of friends among his colleagues and
students. He is remembered by all for his personal qualities and for
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his dedication to the Department of Mechanical Engineering and
to the Institute. He consciously strived throughout his career to
ensure continued excellence of the Department, the preeminence
of which was a constant source of pride for him. His concern for
students was deep and genuine, not only for their professional
development, but for their growth as educated persons in the
broadest sense. Truly a master teacher with a highly individual
style, he patiently led students, by means of leading questions, to
individual discovery and insight. No less was he concerned with the
discovery and nurturing of the promising young faculty members,
by this means imprinting the Department with his lasting influence.
Professor Keenan's works on thermodynamics are world-
renowned and have directly and indirectly changed the face of
thermodynamics teaching in engineering. His contributions to
thermodynamics derived from an uncompromising search for un-
derstanding and elimination of ambiguities overlooked or accepted
by others. He developed a coherent and logical exposition of the
fundamentals of thermodynamics so that the widest possible range
of problems could be considered in a uniform and consistent
manner. To the very end he strove to improve the exposition and
to make it more useful for practicing engineers. His famous
textbook, Thermodynamics, published in 1941, remains a classic. It
represents the distilled essence of thinking up to that time, and it is
characterized by simplicity of approach, rigor in logical develop-
ment, and economy of effort. This book has had an authoritative
and continuous influence on teachers of thermodynamics, in all
branches of engineering, and throughout the world.
James B. Killian, ir., then Chairman of the MIT Corporation, said
of Professor Keenan in 1966:
To my mind he is one of the finest examples I know of a scholar of the first
order who is also unremittingly interested in and concerned with the art of
teaching. Not only has he made important contributions to the body of
knowledge and understanding in the field of thermodynamics, but he has
been able with great success to transmit his understanding to his students
and associates.
Through his writing and teaching, Professor Keenan brought to
the engineering profession the fundamental work of J. Willard
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Gibbs in thermodynamics, which, for the most part, had been
overlooked by engineers and scientists for five decades. In the
1930's he adapted Gibbs' concept of thermodynamic availability to
the steady-flow processes of engineering. The initial motivation for
this development was the allocation of fuel costs in a process with
many outputs. The concepts of availability soon became widely
used in chemical engineering and power-plant engineering, par-
ticularly abroad. In the United States, it has in a sense been tardily
rediscovered and has recently become an important tool in the
shaping of a national energy policy.
In the late 1950's and 1960's, Professor Keenan contributed to a
new interpretation of thermodynamics that is applicable to a much
wider range of systems and physical phenomena than any other
interpretation presented in the past. This new interpretation
applies to quantum systems and classical systems, relativistic me-
chanics and Newtonian mechanics, nuclear reactions and chemical
reactions, fluids and solids, and to single molecules. It is presented
in a book he coauthored, Principles of General Thermodynamics,
published in 1965. In this book, the conflict between the postulates
of thermodynamics, including irreversibility, and those of quantum
mechanics are resolved, and many aspects of these two sciences are
unified into a single conceptual entity.
The development of accurate tables of the properties of steam,
so vital to the electric power industry, was a continuing preoccupa-
tion during Professor Keenan's career, the initial milestone being
his appointment in 1929 as the U.S. delegate to the First Interna-
tional Conference on the Properties of Steam; he served as dele-
gate in all successive conferences on this subject until the eighth in
1974. His name is synonymous with the Steam Tables, familiar to
generations of students and practicing engineers; he was author or
coauthor of successively improved tables of steam properties pub-
lished in 1930, 1936,1939, and 1969, all of them authoritative. The
Air Tables, and then the Gas Tables, which he also coauthored,
provided for the emerging gas-turbine industry what the Steam
Tables had done for the steam-power industry.
During his professional career, Professor Keenan conducted
significant experimental research, most of which represented
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pioneering efforts. Among his works were the determination of
steam-turbine nozzle performance, experiments on friction coeffi-
. ~ . . . . .
clents of alr at supersonic speec is, experiments on lnJectors anc on
heat transfer at high speeds, the development of the free-piston
compressor for gas-turbine applications, the development of
equipment for processing coffee and cocoa, and the development
of dust-separation equipment.
Professor Keenan headed the Department of Mechanical En-
gineering at MIT from 1958 to 1961, leading the Department
through the post-Sputnik years, one of the most difficult periods of
its recent history. The introspective studies under his leadership
were important factors in the changes that kept the Department in
. . .
a preeminent position.
Among the many honors awarded to Professor Keenan are
Honorary Membership in the American Society of Mechanical
Engineers ~ 1966), the Worcester Reed Warner Medal of the
American Society of Mechanical Engineers (1954) for permanent
contributions to the literature of engineering, a Fulbright Lecture-
ship at Cambridge University and at the Imperial College of
Science and Technology in London (1951), an Honorary Doctor of
Laws degree from the University of Glasgow (1966), and Member-
ship in the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (1937) and the
National Academy of Engineering (1976~.
Professor Keenan is survived by his wife, the former Isabel
Morrison, and two children, Mrs. John W. Carr III of Bryn Mawr,
Pennsylvania, a Research Associate at the Philadelphia Child Guid-
ance Clinic, and Matthew A. Keenan of 4 Dana Road, Belmont, an
investment counselor.
Professor and Mrs. Keenan were summer residents of Nantucket
for forty-five years. For the last ten years they lived in the Shimmo
section of the island.
An avid sailor and tennis player, Joseph Henry Keenan was a
Member of the Siasconset Casino, the Belmont Hill Club, the Har-
vard Musical Association, and the Nantucket Yacht Club.
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