John Saunders

I went to Canada rather than the United States because the Canadian company Canadian Aviation Electronics had come to Manchester University recruiting, and because Canada solicited immigrants and had a processing office next to Manchester City Hall. Right after graduation I flew to Montreal. It was my longest flight, about 18 hours, and in the only big piston-engined plane. The plane was dodging storm clouds all the way, Gander was socked in, so it went on to Montreal.

It turned out that Canadian Aviation Electronics paid its English engineers below the Canadian prevailing rate, and its Dutch technicians even worse, especially as Dutch technicians were as well qualified as Canadian engineers. They overhauled military aircraft radars, and made flight simulators. I had fun using the test radar to lock on to airliners landing by the back of the factory. Although I got a big raise in weeks, I left for RCA Service Company down the road before my one-year contract was up, for much more. The contract was not enforceable in Quebec, but they did deduct the plane fare from my last paycheck. RCA serviced Dew Line early-warning radars. Before long, RCA sent me to Camden to work on the Avro Arrow. We had an apartment in eastern Philadelphia. This job came to a sudden end when Diefenbaker scrapped that excellent plane, dealing a devastating blow to the Canadian aviation industry. Everybody was laid off immediately, and had to make their own way back to Canada.

It is noteworthy that both Canadian Aviation Electronics and RCA had used me extensively as a technical instructor, more because of my excellent knowledge of electronic circuits than for my academic qualifications.

Fortunately, I had taken out a loan from RCA, so they made an effort to place me. I hit it big with a job in their Research Laboratories, on the strength of being able to define "correlation coefficient". This is because they had a contract to find a method of locating incoming Russian planes who were jamming the radars. I developed a machine to demonstrate this. I did well there, rising to the fancy title of "Senior Member of Scientific Staff", which was supposed to be restricted to PHDs, but my salary required this title.

In the early 60s, the Canadian Defense Research Establishment designed the Alouette satellites, which provide information for long-distance short-wave radio communication. They came to RCA for the telemetry transmitters, because only RCA Laboratories in New Jersey could make HF power transistors. I got to design them, and they were successful. They were the first transistor telemetry transmitters in space. This led to me delivering a paper on it to 3000 of my peers in the great hall of the Egyptian Museum in Philadelphia for the International Solid-State Circuits Conference. It was well received because, in addition to the new transistors, it used two esoteric techniques: the use of varactor diodes for power frequency multiplication and frequency-modulation of a crystal-controlled oscillator.

The Canadian Government decided to award the contract for the follow-on ISIS satellites to industry, and RCA got the contract. The Alouette chief engineer selected me to be the ISIS chief engineer after interviewing RCA's candidates. I was expected to rubber-stamp his ideas, but that did not happen. As it turned out, ISIS was the first satellite to use integrated circuits, and the first to use digital telemetry. These innovations were opposed by the Canadians, but they were overruled by NASA and the American instrument scientists who believed in my proposals. The two ISIS satellites were used longer than any other scientific satellite, first by Canada, then NASA, then Japan. But I left after the main design work was done, over a pay dispute with my boss, the Program Manager. I returned to the Research Laboratories with a raise, and a position as the director of its electronics section. In 1967, we emigrated to the United States.

At this time I had a side interest. With two collaborators, a heart surgeon and a mechanical engineer, we developed and patented a heart pacemaker which did not require batteries. However, it was never put into production.

Pauline worked for a charitable agency, as a case worker for children in foster care, for which her degree qualified her. She was unhappy that I was paid twice as much for as good a degree, and quit work after Ross was born. Pauline several times had surgery for lumps in her right breast, but all fortunately turned out to be benign. She also suffered from intractable urinary infection, which was not cured until we moved to Connecticut. She had a very bad time with Ross' birth, partly because she is big boned, and also because it was a breech presentation. After 24 hours of labor, she had to have a cesarean. To make matters worse she developed a pulmonary embolism, which kept her hospitalized for a month. Not surprisingly, she later had a cesarean for Michael, and got her tubes tied at the same time. In Catholic Quebec, this required three doctors to certify that another pregnancy would be life-threatening. She already hated the Catholic Church because there were thousands of children in Catholic orphanages, but the law prohibited non-Catholics from adopting them. For myself, being English, I was exposed to prejudice against Roman Catholicism, but, being young, tended to rebel against this teaching. Our Quebec experiences brought out the truth in the evilness of this organization.

When I first landed in Canada, I lived in a rented room, then a month later in a residential hotel in Dorval. After getting married, and after returning from Philadelphia, we took a cheap apartment, then a year later a new one in a good location in Dorval. When Pauline got pregnant with our first child, we bought a good new house in Brossard, across the river from Montreal. My first car was a 1947 Plymouth, for $65, whose only virtue was its coil-spring seats. When it was sold to a junkyard, the owner took out the seats and put them on my porch. Since he lived on the road connecting RCA's parking lot with the factory, I had the chagrin of seeing them sat on for years! A week after getting the RCA Laboratories job, I bought the director's 1955 Super-88 Oldsmobile. I loved that car, at least until I traded it for a 1961 Lincoln, an ex-executive perk. When we moved to the United States, I was driving the Lincoln, Pauline followed in a Buick, with two babies by now. We had already bought a house in Connecticut, and I had a job with a 50% raise.