Archives West Finding Aid

Born at Topeka, Kansas on January 1, 1890, Homer Dana came to the State of Washington with his parents in the early years of the 20th Century. His family homesteaded in central Washington for a time, then moved to the city of Pullman in 1911, where Dana entered the State College of Washington (now Washington State University). He completed a Bachelor's degree in engineering in 1915 and a Master's degree in 1917. For a brief time he was an instructor at the State College, leaving to go into private engineering practice. In the early 1920's Dana returned to WSU and completed a second Master's degree. He was again employed by the College, first as a consulting engineer, and, after 1924, as a research engineer. While the post of research engineer was his major assignment from 1924 until his retirement in 1960, he also taught classes on occasion, participated in the education of graduate students, and served as administrative head of the Engineering Experiment Station after 1945. He was placed on the State College faculty roster in the late 1940's and was designated Professor Emeritus at his retirement.

Although holding teaching and administrative posts, Dana's major work was research. He conceived his research post to be a generalized and wide-ranging assignment and consequently involved himself in work that was often far removed from his "specialty" of instrumentation and electricity. His initial major experimental project was actually a civil engineering problem, consisting of an attempt to determine the effect of heavy automobile traffic on roads and highways. Beginning with the construction of an instrument to measure the "washboard" effect, the project involved the construction and maintenance of highways as well as the construction of automobiles. The tests on roads that Dana carried out for several years in the late 1920's attracted considerable attention and the results were drawn upon by engineers throughout the United States, in Europe and in Asia.

After the completion of the highway tests, Dana concentrated on building fruit-handling equipment and developed a fruit-washing machine and various fruit-testing devices. These fruit-handling projects led him into engineering problems associated with fruit storage, especially refrigeration. He continued this line of investigation for several years in the 1930's while also working on related problems of heat transfer and storage. The heating and refrigeration projects were combined with electrical experimentation in Dana's major research of the late 1930's, a number of experiments known as the Mason City Project. This project was sponsored by the Washington State Planning Council and was connected with the Grand Coulee Dam development. Basically, it involved an attempt to determine the amount of electricity that a community would consume for heating, refrigeration, air conditioning, lighting, and power.

The Mason City Project, operated for the U.S. Government and having economic planning connotations, had been largely inspired as a reaction to the Great Depression. When recovery from this depression began in the late 1930's, Dana's work took on a different character. As demand from industry increased, he began developing specific processes and products for industrial applications. During this period he developed the "torque screw pole tester," a device for non-destructive testing of highline power transmission poles. At about the same time he began a series of studies on the problem of radio transmission to and from aircraft. This research was begun in cooperation with United Air Lines, but after the United States entered World War II, the project was transferred to the Army Air Corps. The basic problem that Dana attempted to solve in the radio experiments involved the suppression of static created by the "corona" of electrical charges built up around a moving aircraft. After much measurement to determine the nature of the corona, Dana eventually devised his "block and squirter system," a device that effected a considerable reduction of the corona effect.

Although the corona project was not quite finished, the Air Corps dropped it in the research cut-backs that accompanied the end of the war. In spite of this setback Dana saw the project through to completion using WSU facilities. The project also served as the lead-in to his next major project, likewise an aircraft communications problem and a defense-sponsored research effort. This project, carried out in the late 1940's and early 1950's, began as an attempt to develop a new aircraft communication system based on the broadcast of "facsimile" signals. This system, a combination of television and photocopy, proved to be of limited use, but in developing it Dana became involved in the "new" field of duplicating papers. He eventually developed his own "Fax" paper, one of the ancestors of later well-known photocopy paper.

The defense-inspired Fax paper project was but one of many experimental projects undertaken by Dana in response to the great demand for engineering services that faced him after World War II. At this time he found himself working on a number of major projects simultaneously, partly because he had become the administrator of the Engineering Experiment Station, in addition to being the major researcher. He once more attacked a number of problems associated with heating and refrigeration, improved his pole tester, carried out follow-up experiments on aircraft communication, and developed an aircraft warning light system for high voltage electric transmission cables and broadcasting towers. In addition he did considerable work on instrumentation, working on meters for the measure of "emotional stress," an attempt at improvement of the so-called "lie detectors."

The various research projects undertaken by Dana over the years produced a number of patentable devices and processes. In order that these might be available for industrial and commercial use, Dana joined other inventors in the Pullman area for the incorporation of the Washington State Research Foundation. This organization arranged for patent assignment and licenses of the inventions produced by a number of WSU researchers. Dana served as a manager of this organization for many years, and many of its records are included in this collection.

Dana was the author of a prodigious number of published articles, reports and technical bulletins. No small quantity of these were published as Bulletins of the WSU Engineering Experiment Station, while others were presented at professional meetings, or were the subject of publications on engineering and science. He was also often called upon to present information concerning his work at professional conferences and public meetings.

Homer Dana continued to be active after his retirement, at the age of 70 in 1960. His activities were increasingly curtailed by failing health after 1965, although he retained his interest in engineering research and continued to work on ideas for research projects. He died on December 17, 1970 at Spokane, Washington.