"Joe" as all his friends and associates called him, started his education by walking 5 miles every day on a dirt road to
a one-room schoolhouse in Sleepy Eye, Minnesota. In his teens he spent his summers herding cattle on horseback and harvesting
wheat on thrashing crews from sun-up to sun-down.
In his early twenties he earned college tuition as a foundry man pouring ingots of molton iron at Western Electric. His
interest in transporation issues was launched when he learned the tool and die trade, manufaturing tire tread molds for Goodyear.
Joe received his B.A. in Physics in 1931 and his M.S. in Spectroscopy in 1934 at the University of Alberta at Edmonton.
During World War Two, he was over the age limit for military service so he contributed to the war effort by designing the
remote control gun turret system on the Boeing B-29 "Super Fortress." In addition he developed the periscope gun-aiming system
for the Douglas A-26 and B-26 attack bombers.
In 1945, following the war, Joe moved his wife and two children to Pasadena, California, where he used his physics background
to design movie cameras used by the major Hollywood studios.
In 1947, he moved to Pacific Palisades and accepted a position as Assistant Professor in UCLA's newly formed College of
Engineering. His instruction in the areas of machine design, mechanism and kinematics at UCLA spanned more than 25 years.
In 1959 he earned his Doctor Ingeneur in Kinematics from the Technical University of Hannover, Germany. At the time no
American University offered an advanced degree in Kinematics which Joe defined as: "The study of the effects of velocity and
acceleration upon mass, with respect to the position and attitude of that mass."
Joe's legacy to the world, for which he is fondly remembered, include: 1) his thousands of UCLA students scattered all
over the globe. 2) his many publications on mechanism and kinematics which are collectors' items, and 3) the vector force
system of kinematics analyses which Joe refined during his many years of teaching kinematics.
One of his most challenging assignments was as a consultant for the US Navy's proposed orbiting Space Lab. Joe was responsible
for calculating the friction forfce on the gimble air bearings. The resulting equation was five pages long requiring two months
for UCLA's computer lab to run the program without crashing.
His gift to the 21st century was his research on the dynamic axle weights of heavy trucks resulting in the Beggs/Chiang
Hypothesis: The sum of the dynamic axle weights exceeds the sum of the static axle weights by the spike load of the pitching
about the center of mass upon initial braking of a 2 axle vehicle. In plain English, the weight of the vehicle dramatically
increases when the driver applies the brakes. This is muhc more pronounced in heavy-duty trucks.
