History
Joseph D. Chapline: Technical Communication's Mozart
By Ed Malone
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Joseph D. Chapline, who celebrated his 87th birthday last August, worked for the Eckert-Mauchly Computer Corporation in Philadelphia from 1947 to 1955 [1]. He was a lone technical writer when he started working on the documentation for the BINAC, an early electronic computer. Later, he was a manager of technical writers at EMCC and Philco [2]. About eight years ago, in a documentary film about John Mauchly's life, Chapline compared his writing of the BINAC manual to Mozart's composition of the opera Don Giovanni: "[Mozart] knew everything about it at once in his brain -- which is an amazing thing to say. But I had an experience just like it with that BINAC. I came out of there saying I know exactly how to write that book. And I sat down. I wrote it long hand [over a number of days]" [3]. (Chapline, by the way, published an English-language version of Mozart's Regina Coeli in 1958 [4]). |
Active in PGEWS
The founders of PGEWS included Eleanor M. McElwee (1924- ), a technical editor at RCA; Charles Meyer (1908-2001), her boss at RCA; Herbert B. Michaelson (1916 - ), an editor at IBM; and Joseph Chapline (1920- ), who by then had left EMCC for Philco [6]-[7]. Chapline -- along with several others -- attended a "founders' meeting" on March 19, 1957 [8].
During his time with the organization, Chapline accomplished the following:
- sat on the first administrative committee [9]
- presented a paper at the first national symposium in October 1957 [10]
- chaired PGEWS for one year [11]
- published several articles in the Transactions [10], [12]-[13]
- chaired a major colloquium and edited its proceedings [14]
Recollections of PGEWS
Recently, in our e-mail correspondence, Chapline made these comments about PGEWS:
We, the guiding force, felt that we were attacking something bigger than our poor effort; the group was supposed to stir the whole tribe of thousands of engineers into improving their style of writing.... It was well-intended, but my conclusion this far into the future was that our efforts were really superficial.
One of the main problems was that we couldn't get lots of engineers in a room and teach them... the typical engineers couldn't be made to realize that they didn't write very well... As a result we tended to look to the various 'cells' of the IEEE to sponsor local branches of the main society to work with small local groups in bettering the skill of writing. It was never a howling success. We did get a few such efforts to operate, but I always felt that our drive, though strong and clear, was not in tune with the typical electrical engineer [15].
More than 200 Courses
After he left Philco in the 1960s, Chapline developed an effective-writing course that he taught more than 200 times at such places as the Philadelphia Electric Company, the Aberdeen Proving Ground, Drexel University, RCA, and Campbell Soup. This 10-week course covered such topics as definitions, verbs, organization of material, editing and style, dictionaries, and language types, and the sentence. "A good sentence," Chapline wrote, "is like a taut string: it vibrates and builds tension" [16, p. 2].
"By This Still Hearth"
Tennyson wrote that "Old age hath yet his honour and his toil" [17, p. 417]. In his old age, Chapline builds fine furniture from exotic woods. Among his recent creations are two side tables and a case to display a friend's valuable book [18]. He is also the proud builder of approximately thirty organs, including a 15-foot-high pipe organ that sits majestically in his home in New Hampshire [19]-[20]. Listen to the organ at the end of the documentary film about Mauchly, and you will know how it sounds -- "some work of noble note" [17, p. 417].
Post Script
McElwee celebrated her 83rd birthday last May at her home in Oregon. She had not communicated with Chapline since the 1960s. A few months ago, I passed along Joe's e-mail address, and the two old friends have been "catching up on all those missing years" [21].
References
[1] "Meet Our Contributors." IRE Transactions on Engineering Writing and Speech, vol. 2, no. 2, 1958, pp. 2-3
[2] R. John Brockmann, "The Story of Joseph D. Chapline, First Computer Documentation Writer and Manager, 1948-1955," From Millwrights to Shipwrights to the Twenty-First Century: Explorations in a History of Technical Communication in the United States, Cresshill: Hampton, 1998, pp. 279-328
[3] John Mauchly: The Computer and the Skateboard, Dir. Paul David and Jim Reed, N.p.: BlastOffMedia, 2000
[4] Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, Regina Coeli: (K. 276) for Four-Part Chorus of Mixed Voices and Four Solo Voices, with Piano Accompaniment. Trans. Joseph D. Chapline, New York : G. Schirmer, 1958
[5] R. John Brockman [sic], "SIGDOC Reminiscences," ACM Journal of Computer Documentation, vol. 25, no. 2, 2001, pp. 40-41
[6] Eleanor M. McElwee, e-mail to author, August 14, 2007
[7] "Deaths," The University of Chicago Magazine, February 2002, http://magazine.uchicago.edu/0202/class-notes/deaths-print.html
[8] Eleanor M. McElwee, "Founders' Conference: Report on Meeting of Committee for New IRE Professional Group," Newsletter [of the IEEE-Group on Professional Communication], vol. 2, no. 2, 1977, pp. 5-6
[9] "IRE Professional Group on Engineering Writing and Speech," IRE Transactions on Engineering Writing and Speech, vol. 1, no. 1, 1958, inside cover
[10] J. D. Chapline, "Tricks of the Trade," IRE Transactions on Engineering Writing and Speech, vol. 1, no. 1, 1958, pp. 6-11
[11] Rudy Joenk, "The Officers of PCS," IEEE Professional Communication Newsletter, July-Aug. 1997, pp. 16-18
[12] J. D. Chapline, "How to Become a Dictator," IRE Transactions on Engineering Writing and Speech, vol. 2, no. 2, 1959, pp. 42-45
[13] J. D. Chapline, "The Editorial Function in Scientific Organization," IRE Transactions on Engineering Writing and Speech, vol. 3, no. 2, 1960, pp. 48-53
[14] Joseph D. Chapline, ed. Proceedings of the 1963 IEEE/MSU Colloquium on the Manager's Role in Organizational Communications, New York: IEEE, 1964
[15] Joseph Chapline, e-mail to author, Sep. 19, 2007
[16] Joseph Chapline, Effective Writing, a 4-page brochure about his course
[17] Alfred Lord Tennyson, "Ulysses," Victorian Prose and Poetry, ed. Lionel Trilling and Harold Bloom, New York, Oxford, 1973, pp. 416-418
[18] Joseph Chapline, letter to author, Oct. 14, 2007
[19] Joseph Chapline, e-mail to author, Sept. 17, 2007
[20] Joseph Chapline, Newbury Organ, a 4-page brochure about the organ
[21] Eleanor McElwee, e-mail to author, Oct. 2, 2007
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Ed Malone is Director of Technical Communication Programs in the Department of English and Technical Communication (http://english.mst.edu) at the Missouri University of Science and Technology in Rolla, Missouri. He is researching the technical writing profession in the 1950s.