MIT Electrical Engineering and Computer Science EECS Great Educators

Professor Frazier had a long and distinguished career at MIT, as a student, an educator, an administrator, a researcher, and an engineering consultant to numerous industrial organizations. He was known widely as an expert in the fields of electric circuits and electromagnetic devices and systems.

A dedicated educator, he participated in three major revisions of the teaching programs of the Department of Electrical Engineering. In the 1930s he helped form and conduct the department's "Honors Program," for especially gifted students. In the 1940s he participated in the development of the department's Electronic Applications option, one of four offered to undergraduates between 1942 and 1953. In the 1950s, he helped develop new energy-conversion courses for the Department's major curriculum change toward engineering science.

When World War II placed extra demands on the MIT faculty, Professor Frazier not only carried heavy teaching loads, but also assumed extensive administrative responsibilities for on-campus Army and Navy educational programs.

Professor Frazier's research, at the Dynamic Analysis and Control Laboratory from 1947 to 1958, involved the analysis, design and development of several different high-performance electromagnetic devices, including torque motors, tachometers and actuators. An excellent analyst, Professor Frazier wrote technical reports on these subjects that were widely circulated and that served as bibles for torque motor and actuator design for more than 30 years.

Professor Frazier was involved in the Hawthorne Experiment, the pioneering work in operations research conducted at the Western Electric Plant in Cicero, Illinois. He assisted in the survey of working conditions among employees during the summer of l929.

Upon his retirement in 1965, Professor Frazier started a second career as a part-time research staff member and counselor of electrical engineering students at what is now the Charles Stark Draper Laboratory. He continued to apply his analytical skills to gyros, accelerometers, resolvers, torque motors and electromagnetic suspension devices for spacecraft guidance systems.

Professor Frazier was born May 29, 1900 in Bellevue, Pennsylvania. He came to MIT in 1919 as a result of the friendship between his grandfather and MIT president General Francis Amasa Walker. He received the SB and SM degrees in electrical engineering in 1923 and 1932, respectively. He was appointed Instructor in 1925 and full professor in 1961. Except for the 1935-36 year when he visited the University of Kansas and was temporarily in charge of the electrical engineering department there, he spent forty years as a faculty member at MIT. His association with the Institute was always his first interest outside his family. For several years he served as Class Secretary for the Class of 1923.

In Kansas he met and married Vivian Skilton in June 1936. As a faculty wife, Vivian was an active MIT Matron. They had two children and four grandchildren. He delighted in his family. Two years after Mrs. Frazier's death, he married Elizabeth Howland.

Professor Frazier was known and respected both within MIT and throughout industry for his ability to organize and break down difficult technical problems into simple terms. He was widely acclaimed for his devotion to technical excellence and for his meticulous attention to fine-grain details. As one colleague put it: "He's the guy to see if you have an impossible problem to solve."

His services as a consultant were highly sought by some twenty companies. He was the author of the textbook Elementary Electric Circuit Theory and some seventy-five journal articles and reports.

Professor Frazier died in 1991. He is remembered as a fine and caring gentleman and a great educator, who often enjoyed lunch with friends at his favorite spot, the Copley Plaza in Boston.

Professor Frazier was a Fellow of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, and a member of Tau Beta Pi, Eta Kappa Nu, Sigma Xi, the American Society for Engineering Education, the American Association of University Professors, and the Society for the History of Technology.