In Memory: Dave Staelin

MIT announced the passing of Dave Stalin. I knew Dave since 1965. In fact, I went to  his first class as a Faculty member which was Radio Astronomy. It was in the Fall of 1965 it was the first class I dropped into just out of curiosity and not because I was required to take it. Dave was always a bit of a polymath, and over the past 46 years our paths have crisscrossed many times. About ten months ago was the last I spoke with Dave at lunch in the Stata building, we sat for a couple of hours and discussed politics, and his views. I listened, he sent me his thoughts and we compared notes.

In between those years, Dave and I have bounced back and forth while in many varying worlds. While at Comsat he was good friends with my boss, Jack Harrington, and we bought a company Dave introduced us to called ERT, whose CEO John Gaut, I believe, was also one who I had interaction with. Dave and I discussed the future of environmental testing and monitoring, and ERT was then positioned to contribute and we had the satellites to do the monitoring. Yet we were a bit too early.
Then in the 80s I ran across Dave at PictureTel, one of his student founded companies, which morphed to Polycom, and lives on today. PictureTel was one of the first, if not the first, to compress real time video and send it over a data telephone line. It worked and it was the beginning of what we see today. It was Dave who saw the potential and Dave who held the vision aloft those many years.

Then in the 90s I met up with Dave again while he was at MIT Lincoln Lab, a former home to the two of us, and we tried to get Lincoln to act as a support for the US wireless industry. Good idea but wrong politics.

Then back at MIT for the past few years Dave and I met frequently. I reminded him that his book on electromagnetics got me through my FCC License exams with flying colors, it read like a great novel, now who else could do that to Maxwell Equations.

Dave was one of those rare individuals whose great insight and gentlemanly manner allowed great ideas to flourish. He will be missed.