PE&RS August 2000

ASPRS 2000 Yearbook

Memorial Address

GOMER McNEIL

By James Cummins

“It is Better to Light One Candle Than to Curse the Dark” Gomer was always working toward solutions. Solutions that would help someone else do their job. These solutions ranged from panoramic cameras developed for the Navy to Polaroid-based sequence cameras for recording sports motions.

I have the privilege of presenting a tribute to Gomer McNeil, a past president of this Society. Gomer was president of ASPRS in 1965.

Within the Society, Gomer served as chairman of the Publications Committee, Exhibits chairman, chairman of the Research Committee, and was a member of the Board of Directors and Executive Committee. He received the Talbert Abrams award in 1969, and the Sherman Mills Fairchild Photogrammetric Award in 1971. He was a Registered Professional Engineer MD, DC, and a Mason.

He was the United States Correspondent for Photogrammetria, the Navy representative at the Seventh International Congress and Exposition of Photogrammetry at the Hague in 1948, and was the United States Reporter, Commission V at the Eighth International Congress and Exposition of Photogrammetry at Stockholm, Sweden in 1956.

If Gomer were making this presentation, his opening words would be, “Lads and Lassies.” He would have worn or carried something “orange” in honor of Syracuse University. Or, perhaps it would be the McNeil tartan or plaid.

In the late1950s I met Gomer when I joined his company, Photogrammetry, Inc. At the time, I was attending the University of Maryland and working towards a degree in Mathematics. I graduated, went on to graduate school, and left Photogrammetry, Inc. However, the McNeil association became lifetime when I married Gomer’s daughter, Dee Dee. So I knew Gomer both professionally and personally.

Those who worked directly with him, or knew him from his work in the field and the Society, will always remember his enthusiasms and passions: Syracuse University football, his family, anything Scottish, this Society, and, of course, his own professional work. His priorities were clear. On Saturdays during football season, it was Syracuse University football. He had season tickets to both the home and the away Syracuse University football games. With respect to sports, he was a serious and enthusiastic person, not a passive fan. This was true of his personal life as well as his professional activities.

Gomer was born in 1917 in Pennsylvania. He graduated from Syracuse University in 1939 with a degree in Civil Engineering. Following graduation, Gomer held positions with the Tennessee Valley Authority, Army Ordnance Department, Army Air Corps, and Bell Aircraft Company. During World War II he served with the U.S. Navy in the Pacific Theater as a Photographic Interpretation Officer.

Shortly after the end of World War II, Gomer came to the Naval Photographic Interpretation Center in Washington, DC. This initiated a lifelong personal and professional association with Arthur Lundahl, past president and Honorary Member of ASPRS. Gomer soon became chief of the Photogrammetry Division and his small team found national recognition for the quality of their work.

In 1952, Gomer founded Photogrammetry, Inc. in Silver Spring, Maryland. Much of the work of Photogrammetry, Inc. in the 1950s and 60s was highly classified. Many interesting projects and accomplishments will remain unpublicized. The company was deeply involved with Cold War reconnaissance imagery (aerial and ground), and the first satellite-based systems.

An Intelligence Systems Division within Photogrammetry, Inc. produced a series of industrial photo interpretation manuals for the Air Force, and this group served as consultants to the military and related industry partners. A commercial Arial Photographic Division closed in 1960 as the company focused more on R&D of instruments and professional studies.

The real love for Gomer seemed to be the products of Photogrammetry, Inc. He saw opportunities in problems, and assembled a team of engineers and scientists to offer solutions. The products they developed included precision instruments for measuring and calibrating distortion, panoramic cameras with metric calibrations, light tables, photographic equipment, aids for photo interpreters, graphical and mechanical aids for calculations related to imagery, and special recording devices for reconnaissance applications.

When ICBM missiles were introduced, it became important to absolutely locate places on the Earth. Gomer worked on zenith cameras that could be taken to remote places to photograph the stars on glass plates at precisely known times. The calibration of the system, the reduction of the raw data, and the production of coordinates were tedious. It was, however, the best solution at the time.

Camera calibrators (distortion, resolution, and focal length) for aerial cameras were developed and produced by Photogrammetry, Inc. Later, the same understanding of requirements and solutions made it possible to produce calibrators for underwater cameras. The precision film work and technology developed for the calibrator targets led to other applications. When Johns Hopkins APL required a photographic mask-based and optical fiber-based modeling solution to simulate radar antenna patterns, they went to Gomer.

In 1969, Photogrammetry, Inc. was sold and became a division of Data Corporation but still under the leadership of Gomer. In 1972, the operations became Mitchell Photogrammetry and Gomer stayed for some period as a consultant. He gradually withdrew to concentrate on underwater optics and photography, and to do follow-on work to his “orange book,” Optical Fundamentals of Underwater Photography, which was published in Second Edition in 1972.

About this time, Gomer began a long and difficult battle against cancer. He continued to work from his home, and Myrtie Mae, his loving wife, became a constant travel and meeting companion as he battled the complications from a brain tumor.

When we gather and honor a past president of ASPRS, the focus is often on the technical accomplishments, or the society positions held and the associated work. There is another side, however, which is the personal foundation that leaders such as Gomer T. McNeil created for those who followed.

No matter how others acted or tolerated less than the best, Gomer followed his own high professional and personal standards. No publication or other work product left his hand without careful review and painstaking checking of calculations and assumptions. He also took the title “Professional Engineer” very seriously. To this day, when I make a typo, or careless mistake, I think back to the example he and his peers set for producing quality work.

Gomer worked with others at all levels. It could be a student needing some advice or the CEO of a major corporation. Being the president of a major technical society with international, academic, and corporate members is a challenge requiring technical and management excellence, respect from peers, diplomacy, understanding of budgets and schedules, and many hours of meetings and coordination.

Gomer was always promoting the profession of photogrammetry and its applications. Two of his books served as introductions to Photogrammetry — ABCs of Photogrammetry (1949) and Photographic Measurements (1954)

Gomer and Myrtie Mae McNeil.

His technical passions included underwater photography and ortho cameras (photography without perspective). Gomer published a number of articles on underwater photography and the optical considerations for underwater photography. He worked closely with both military and prestigious civilian photographers.

Gomer liked to say, “There is a world of photography at less than infinity.”

During most of the time that Gomer was active in the field of photogrammetry, the emphasis was on work based on aerial photography and the associated metrics. For practical purposes, the photographic focus was at infinity. Gomer, however, applied expertise and understanding of the principles of photogrammetry to opportunities existing underwater, on land, in the laboratory, and in factories. He didn’t invent “close up” or non-topographic photogrammetry (no more than someone invented the internet), he simply saw applications and opportunities. He explained the technical concepts of metrical photography to those with an application and then created prototype or production instruments. He promoted the profession of photogrammetry to other engineering disciplines and to non-engineers.

A typical example is a solution for Westinghouse. The task was to measure the 3-dimensional location and size of embedded particles that could only be seen with x-rays. He worked on metrics for stereo x-ray analysis and his company produced a stereo x-ray comparator to provide the necessary data.

For the Navy he developed many panoramic cameras with attention to the metrics and potential photogrammetric applications. In 1960, one of Gomer’s panoramic cameras went aboard the nuclear submarine USS Seadragon to the North Pole, and took an almost 360-degree panoramic picture “South.” It was not a very interesting photo for lush vegetation and scenery, but a nice technical and logistics event.

For the FAA he worked on the calibration of hand-held 35mm cameras for capturing both image and metric survey information for planned radar locations. Prior to this, the photographs were simply references for other work, instead of being usable for measurements of azimuth and elevation of potential obstacles.

He combined his love of sports with business and produced specialty cameras for the teaching of sports and real-time game analysis. His company produced probably the first camera used in a professional football coaches’ box for formation analysis during a professional game. Aside from the testing being a nice way to see a Redskins game from the coaches’ box, this is an example of someone who was always thinking, “What can we do differently and better to help someone else do their job?” Gomer’s company also developed and produced a Polaroid-based sequence camera for recording sports motions, such as a golf swing, that was endorsed by Arnold Palmer.

In his final years, he devoted most of his time to the field of underwater optics and photography. He worked closely with the Naval Photographic Center.

In today’s age of computers, easy calculations to umpteen decimal places, computer modeling, and rapid analysis of alternative scenarios, it is hard to appreciate the weeks and months it took the pioneers to accomplish their tasks. Graphical techniques, nomographs, slide rules, the marvelous chug-chug mechanical calculators, and large books of tables were used for calculation assistance.

We can wonder how the professionals from the past accomplished so much when the basic calculations and tedious checking of manual work took so much precious time. We can all think about how nice it would be for some of the past greats to work with today’s computers, modeling, and effortless calculations. Today we have on-line collaboration and sharing of information from all over the world.

In Gomer’s time, organizational coordination was done by traveling and meeting people. There were no fax machines, no e-mail, no internet, no readily available computing power. How would Gomer fare today? Very nicely. Scientists and engineers still have to be able to judge the data, reproduce results, challenge assumptions, and work together. People skills, technical skills, honesty, and personal integrity would still count.

In conclusion, we honor the past leaders for their contributions:

• standards of leadership, ethics, and professionalism;
• the great enthusiasm they had, shared, and created in others;
• their unselfish dedication of enormous amounts of time and energy for their profession;
• direct technical contributions such as the lectures, publications, patents, and books; and,
• mentoring and encouraging others to grow professionally.

In all of these, Gomer McNeil was one of the Big Laddies. Among the others that are honored by the Society, he helped make it possible for those that followed to have an excellent foundation of prior work and to have a Society that is internationally respected.

Through Gomer I had the opportunity to meet others, such as Arthur Lundahl, who have also been honored by this society. In his eulogy of Gomer, Arthur Lundahl. remarked that the front of Gomer’s book Photographic Measurements has the quote “It is Better to Light One Candle Than to Curse the Dark.” Lundahl said, “Gomer was always working for a solution and not cursing the dark.”