VECTOR MECHANICS FOR ENGINEERS
As publishers of the books by Ferd Beer and Russ Johnston we are often asked how they happened to write their books together with one of them at Lehigh and the other at the University of Connecticut.
The answer to this question is simple. Russ Johnston’s first teaching appointment was in the Department of Civil Engineering and Mechanics at Lehigh University. There he met Ferd Beer, who had joined that department two years earlier and was in charge of the courses in mechanics.
Ferd was delighted to discover that the young man who had been hired chiefly to teach graduate structural engineering courses was not only willing but eager to help him reorganize the mechanics courses. Both believed that these courses should be taught from a few basic principles and that the various concepts involved would be best understood and remembered by the students if they were presented to them in a graphic way. Together they wrote lecture notes in statics and dynamics, to which they later added problems they felt would appeal to future engineers, and soon they produced the manuscript of the first edition of Mechanics for Engineers that was published in June 1956. T
he second edition of Mechanics for Engineers and the first edition of Vector Mechanics for Engineers found Russ Johnston at Worcester Polytechnic Institute and the next editions at the University of Connecticut. In the meantime, both Ferd and Russ assumed administrative responsibilities in their departments, and both were involved in research, consulting, and supervising graduate students—Ferd in the area of stochastic processes and random vibrations and Russ in the area of elastic stability and structural analysis and design. However, their interest in improving the teaching of the basic mechanics courses had not subsided, and they both taught sections of these courses as they kept revising their texts and began writing the manuscript of the first edition of their Mechanics of Materials text.
Their collaboration spanned more than half a century and many successful revisions of all of their textbooks, and Ferd’s and Russ’s contributions to engineering education have earned them a number of honors and awards. They were presented with the Western Electric Fund Award for excellence in the instruction of engineering students by their respective regional sections of the American Society for Engineering Education, and they both received the Distinguished Educator Award from the Mechanics Division of the same society. Starting in 2001, the New Mechanics Educator Award of the Mechanics Division has been named in honor of the Beer and Johnston author team.
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