Arthur Bayard Vane

Arthur Bayard Vane, 88, of Menlo Park, Calif., longtime former Coupeville resident, passed away March 14, 2004, after a long illness.

Born June 1, 1915, in Portland, Maine, to Lynn Packard Vane and Bernice Johnson Vane, he spent his pre-school years in the Philippine Islands, where his father became an officer in the U.S. Coast Artillery. During his grade school years, his father was stationed at Fort Casey, and he attended elementary school in Coupeville. He graduated from high school in the Panama Canal Zone, and entered Lake Forest College in Illinois, near where his father was stationed. Upon Captain Vane’s retirement, the family chose to return to Coupeville. Arthur received a B.S. degree in physical chemistry from the University of Washington in 1937, having earned his way by working some summers as an electrician and plumber, and during the school year working as a photofinisher in a photography studio, and as an electrician in the University of Washington Drama Dept. He went on to earn an M.S. degree in the same field at Oregon State College in 1941, spending two years as a graduate assistant teaching general chemistry, and another as a Research Fellow. He had completed his course work for a Ph.D. when World War II broke out. Because of having been a top student in a radio engineering class, he was asked, in the spring of 1942, to work on the development of microwave radar at the Radiation Laboratory at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, working with a group that was studying the propagation of microwaves.

On the way to Massachusetts, he stopped briefly at his parents’ home in Coupeville to marry Sylvia J. Brakke, and in Rochester, Minn., to meet her family. The Vanes’ son Ronald was born in Cambridge, Mass., in 1945, and their daughters Linda and Laura in the early 1950’s in Menlo Park, Calif.

After World War II, Vane was employed at the U.S. Naval Ordnance Test Station, Inyokern, Calif., as a physicist, developing electronic instrumentation for the measurement and control of rocket and missile flights. From 1947 to 1949 he was a research associate at the Stanford Microwave Laboratory, and received the degree of Engineer from Stanford in 1949.

Mr. Vane joined Varian Associates in 1949. There he designed and produced a comprehensive line of microwave test equipment, drawing on his experience at the Radiation Lab, where members of his group were forced to design their own microwave test equipment. Varian Associates sold this line of test equipment to Hewlett Packard, where it became the basis for Hewlett Packard’s line of microwave test equipment. Vane was then appointed manager of the Radiation Systems Department, where he headed development of electronic equipment and microwave components for use in microwave tubes, and directed research and development work on parametric amplifiers, stable microwave sources, low noise receivers and high power microwave components.

From 1962 to 1965, Mr. Vane was employed by Melabs as manager of their Microwave Department, where he was responsible for the development of an extensive line of microwave components, including ferrite devices, filters, mixers, frequency converters, multipliers, tunnel diode amplifiers and parametric amplifiers.

He joined Varian Associates in May 1965 as a Senior Scientist in the Central Research Laboratories, where he worked on the application of the Gunn effect to microwave power generation. Leaving Varian Associates in 1971, he served as vice-president of Sonoma Engineering and Research in Santa Rosa, CA. He resigned from this position in 1975 and worked briefly at Addington Laboratories before returning for a third time to Varian Associates, from which he retired finally in the fall of 1978.

Vane’s patents on equipment he designed were numerous, and he was published extensively in engineering journals on his work with microwave devices. He was a member of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, Phi Lambda Upsilon, Sigma Pi Sigma, Sigma Xi, the American Chemical Society and the Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers, Inc.

Vane was above all a family man. To further his children’s knowledge of the world, he took a three-month leave of absence in the summer of 1961 to travel with Mrs. Vane and their children to the eastern Mediterranean and western Europe, their children being 9, 11 and 16 at the time. In 1977, Mr. and Mrs. Vane took their daughters on a trip focused on international relations. On this trip they visited the Soviet Union, India, Nepal, Thailand, Hong Kong and Japan, and had an opportunity to meet journalists and government figures in each of them. In the same decade, Vane and his wife attended engineering conferences in Japan and Amsterdam, where he presented papers. The Amsterdam trip was followed by a trip to Kenya and Tanzania.

After Vane’s retirement, he and his wife traveled with Stanford alumni groups and Elderhostel to most of the globe. He returned from each trip with a store of slides and movies on the places they had visited and enjoyed, showing them to friends in the days before foreign travel ceased to be a novelty.

Mr. and Mrs. Vane have been members of the First Congregational Church of Palo Alto for more than 50 years. Mr. Vane in years past served as a member of the Personnel Committee, as a Deacon, and as a member of the church council. He was active with the Palo Alto-Stanford Area Council, Boy Scouts of America, and was active with his family in the Community Committee for International Students at Stanford and its homestay program. He was interested in stereophonic music, family camping while his children were small, and was an avid reader all his life. He also excelled at do-it-yourself construction and repairs.

Mr. Vane is survived by his wife Sylvia, an anthropologist; his son Ronald Vane and daughter-in-law Donna Vane; his daughter Linda Vane, her husband Michael Scarey and daughters Lindsay and Marie; his daughter Laura Ames, her husband Jeffrey Ames and son Brian; his sisters, Marjorie Carpentier and Ivy Williams and fifteen nieces and nephews. Memorial services were held at First Congregational Church of Palo Alto Saturday, March 27. Graveside services will be held Saturday, April 3, at 1 p.m. at Sunnyside Cemetery, where he will be buried in the Vane family plot. A reception for family members and local friends will follow at Coupeville United Methodist Church, which he attended as a boy. Local arrangements under direction of Burley Funeral Chapel.