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Remembering Dorian

“That was one of the first systems I worked on,” he said. A museum piece, I thought. Could anyone still be alive that had anything to do with it? Yes, and I was talking to him. It was a wooden propeller system, not too different from the one used on Lindbergh’s plane. It seemed ancient. There was no one else left in the lobby of the new Pratt & Whitney customer service center but Dorian Shainin and me. He pointed, waved, and carried on, enjoying the chance to tell one more story, laughing as he spoke. He had a full white beard then, because he couldn’t see well enough to shave, but it became him. He told me how the old parts were made, but I have since forgotten. Now, no one knows. Not far from the old wooden propeller was a PW4000, one of the most modern and efficient aircraft engines made. Beside me was a man who, in one way or another, had influenced the people who worked on each. How could technology advance so far in such a short period of time -- in one man’s lifetime? Could the same people who built those old wooden propellers have anything to offer those of us working in the world of the PW4000?

Some years ago, I was teaching the final day of a 6-day Shainin Statistical Engineering Seminar for Pratt & Whitney in East Hartford. John Abrahamian, an engineer with Pratt, had picked up Dorian from his house in Manchester where he and his wife Margaret had lived for 50 years. Dorian spent nearly all those years traveling, speaking, and fixing things. He usually arrived home on Friday night, maybe on the last Northwest flight into Hartford from Detroit.

Dorian and John arrived just after lunch. For the next couple of hours, Dorian told stories to the 35 or so people in the room about working at United Aircraft during the 1930’s, 40’s and 50’s. His voice had faded, but the power in his message remained. You had to listen carefully to hear him, and everyone did. He talked about projects he had worked on, like the Lunar Excursion Module, about people he had known, like W. Edwards Deming and Joseph Juran, and CEO’s that he had known and influenced. I liked hearing stories about testing the WASP engines, which were mounted on planes such as the B-17, nicknamed “Big Friend” by the pilots. Once in a while I still run into a person who attended that class and reminds me how the day was highlighted by listening to Dorian for a couple of hours.
I always enjoyed the long walk through the Pratt manufacturing building in East Hartford, knowing that the engines that played such a big part in winning WWII were made there and were tested in the old booths, which were still standing. What it must have sounded like!

What struck me that day as Dorian talked was that he had started his career on this ground, and here he would finish it. He would never teach another class, had solved his last technical problem, and now had spoken to his last group of engineers. He was a humble man and a genuinely nice guy, but he could be short with people who complicated his message. He saw what he did as simple and logical, and based upon sound engineering principles. Dorian said to keep it simple. Einstein said, “If it isn’t simple, it isn’t right.” Dorian would have agreed.

United Aircraft had been split into several companies by the Federal Government in the late ‘30s. One company was Hamilton Standard. If you drive down Main Street in East Hartford, Connecticut and look at the facade of one of Pratt’s old manufacturing plants, you can still see the Hamilton Standard elliptical logo under the fading paint. Behind that logo Dorian started his career more than 60 years ago.

He never really officially retired, at least not that I remember. He liked to come to annual Shainin meetings that got bigger each year. Dorian showed little interest in managing the company, and left it to his son, Pete. Dorian liked the science of fixing things and being with clients. He never, that I recall, turned down an invitation to spend an evening with a client or one of the employees, as long as he could count on some spirited conversation.
Anyway, I miss the guy and sometimes wish he could see what became of what he started. Statistical Engineering as he knew it, is gone. It has grown, branched, and grown again. I wonder which path he would have taken.

He was certainly recognized and awarded for his contributions to the world of quality, but never obtained or sought the public recognition achieved by others. He wrote and published more than 200 articles in trade journals and a few more in more widely distributed publications. I guess he was thought of as a technical guy, not a management guru. To me, he was both. He knew how to get things done in the factory, not just talk about it, and get them done fast and right.

There was a small and annoying level of criticism about some of the things he developed, but not enough to get him to say more than, “They missed the point.” He never jumped into the fray when criticized for things like the simplicity and lack of statistical power of some of his tools. Taken alone, the criticism had some level of validity, but no test or algorithm developed by Dorian was ever intended for use in the absence of sound engineering work. He never focused only on the statistics. If the project was fixing machines, then you had to know how things worked. Dorian did, and took it for granted that others did as well. That might have been a mistake on his part. He thought that people understood that the tools he developed had to be used in conjunction with a solid technical background. To use his system, you had to understand how the parts fit together to form statistical engineering. If you talked only about one tool without understanding the application, the criticism fell short of being meaningful.

To me, the great debate about statistical engineering, Deming, or 6 Sigma should never have been about quality control. It should never have been about statistics, or even about statistical engineering. It should not have been about common causes or special causes of variation, or reducing variation around some mean value in order to reduce the cost to society. This was all a distraction from the real purpose of what Dorian was doing: make machines work better, and do it as efficiently as possible.