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History of the American Automatic Control Council
The overall structure intended for this work can be summarized as follows:
A descriptive comprehensive history of moderate length of the entire operating period of AACC (1961-1998) which might be published as an article. The current draft of the Preface is approaching this stage. It is to be a narrative history of AACC with appropriately referring to names, events and issues but without complete documentation beyond a list of moderate length of references.
Part 2.
Readers (if any) with interest for the details and actual documentation may turn to Part 2 which contains a history of the various periods: #1, the founding 1956-1960, #2, (1961-1969), #3, 1970-1975, #4, 1976-1981 and #5, 1982-1997 (the latter potentially split into two). Documents of prominent importance will be included in Part 2 with appropriate text explaining the history.
Part 3.
Appendices. A collection of second level important documents without connecting text but referenced in Part 2 and somewhat even in Part 1.

Material currently is written for all three Parts over Periods 1-4. For Period 5 the material is mostly assembled. The Preface is enclosed here, the details in Parts 2 and 3 are available on request.

Part 4.
List of AACC Awardees, Presidents, Vice presidents, Secretaries, Treasurers, Societies, Society directors: JACC Locations, time period, general and program chairmen and then I hope to assemble a complete listing with your extensive help.
Part 1. Preface
In the late 1950's Systems and Control (the emphasis then was on Automatic Control) was a robustly growing area of research and practice roaring toward establishing itself as a new engineering-scientific field. It was sprouting out of World War II research activities mostly at MIT although control as such reaches back into prehistory to the first water wheel driven flour mills and beyond.

Harold Chestnut, Rufus Oldenburger and their associates sensed this to be the right environment to establish worldwide scientific communication and interaction through a robust and lasting international engineering-scientific professional organization. Through marvelous skill, tact and diplomacy they were able to achieve this through the funding of IFAC (International Federation of Automatic Control) reaching across the Iron Curtain at the height of the cold war. IFAC became robust and durable through its organization as an effective (neither too tight nor too loose) federation of many nations each represented by their National Member Organizations (NMO). By an equally admirable act of diplomacy the founders were able to bring together the largest national engineering societies (IEEE, ASME, AICHE, AIAA, ISA, SIAM and others) which were most active in control to form AACC (American Automatic Control Council) as the National Member Organization for the USA. There was no cold war between these societies but of course there was a natural defensiveness about protecting their territories. The choice of a two sided role for AACC as

  1. The channel of cooperation between the US and other nations through IFAC
  2. The channel of cooperation within the US between the dominant societies though a national yearly Joint Automatic Control Conference or JACC gave AACC a stability and endurance through about 50 years now.
1.1. The history of cooperation between AACC and IFAC
The history of IFAC including its triennial congresses is not an objective of this writing which is dealing with the history of cooperation of AACC with IFAC. Because of the well thought out structure and organization this was quite smooth and mostly routine. Two events should be mentioned here and will be elaborated later on in Chapter 2.1.

1.1.1. IFAC is sustained by membership dues paid by individual NMO's of the various nations like AACC for the US
Because of the very wide spread of the size and economic strength of the member nations the rates paid were subdivided into 4 levels (Table 1.2.1). Naturally the rates originally were set in US dollars, the traditional international currency. However, when the devaluation of the dollar started in the seventies, this created an unpredictably variable change in the IFAC budget. Hence, IFAC decided to list its dues in Swiss Franks. AACC agreed somewhat reluctantly thus assuming responsibility for these variable monetary changes. This required adjustments of AACC Sponsoring Society dues to IFAC since that time.

1.1.2. Originally the papers on the program of the triennial IFAC Congresses were selected in two stages:

  1. The Technical Committees of the various National Mother Organizations, which had a structure identical to the Technical committees of IFAC itself, solicited contributed papers and selected worthy ones to be proposed to the technical committees of each particular IFAC Congress.
  2. The latter then used its discretion to select the ones for the program. This was somewhat cumbersome and also somewhat duplicative since the program committee was already composed of the representatives of the various NMO's. So in 19___ the process was simplified to contributed papers being directly submitted to the Program Committee of the specific IFAC Congress which handles the complete review and selection process. The NMO's continued their vigorous activities in initiating and/or steering the various IFAC Symposia which are basically technical symposia created by local initiative in various countries and receiving a public blessing from IFAC by bestowing the name IFAC Symposium. Part 4 contains a list of such symposia.


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