» PRESIDENT’S MESSAGE
The Legacy of George S. Axelby
ur Society lost one of its dear
O friends and pioneers this past
June. George S. Axelby died in
his home after a prolonged illness.
George Axelby was a graduate of the
University of Connecticut and Yale
and worked for Westinghouse in its
Aerospace Division in Baltimore,
Maryland. He was the founding editor
of IEEE Transactions on Automatic Con-
trol in 1956 and the founding editor of
the IFAC journal Automatica in 1968.
He was a member of the first group of
recipients of the IEEE Control Systems
Society Distinguished Member Award
in 1983, a recipient of the IFAC Out-
standing Service Award, and a Fellow
of the IEEE. However, this brief sum-
mary barely touches on the impact
that George Axelby had on our field.
We have George Axelby’s first
issue of IRE Transactions on Automatic
Control, volume 1, issue 1, May 1956,
in IEEE Xplore. Back then, we were
part of the Institute of Radio Engi-
neers (IRE), which merged in 1963
with the smaller American Institute
of Electrical Engineers to form the
current IEEE. Our Control Systems
Society (CSS) was known as the Pro-
fessional Group on Automatic Con-
trol (PGAC), which was formed on
October 5, 1954. PGAC was formed as
a means to disseminate information
about automatic control, its related
interests, its problems, and its devel-
opments. The charter of PGAC was to
organize national group symposia
and technical sessions, local profes-
sional chapters, and to publish IRE
Transactions on Automatic Control. This
charter has not changed much over
the past 54 years.
Digital Object Identifier 10.1109/MCS.2008.927954
10 IEEE CONTROL SYSTEMS MAGAZINE
George Axelby was a member of
the administrative committee of the
PGAC, corresponding to our current
Board of Governors, and he was
Transactions editor. In his editorial in
the first issue, he
wrote “Radio and
electronic engineers
were among those
who created new the-
ories and developed
more advanced feed-
back circuits…and a
new trend is devel-
oping—all of the
complex marvels, the
radar, the television,
the computer, each
containing internal
feedback control
loops, are being com-
bined into over-all automatic control
systems.” George Axelby foresaw the
growth in our field, as he succinctly
stated: “In the future automatic con-
trol will become more complex; it will
encompass broader fields. There will
be a greater need for developing and
incorporating new theories, tech-
niques, and components into inte-
grated systems.”
George Axelby recognized the
potential breadth of the field and the
role of quality publications in advanc-
ing the field. He created standards for
paper submission and instituted the
foundations of our peer review sys-
tem, forming an editorial board to
evaluate contributions for possible
publication. In his words, “the Trans-
actions is the medium where this
information is distributed; it is the
agent where new problems and devel-
opments can be proposed.” In the
early days of the Transactions, the edi-
» OCTOBER 2008
torial board provided the reviews of
the submissions. As submissions
grew, Axelby organized the editorial
board as overseers of our current peer
review system, trained the associate
editors, and created
the information dis-
semination commit-
tee for editorial board
meetings where
acceptance decisions
were made. Axelby
retained his position
as editor through
June of 1968, when he
retired to the position
of consulting editor.
One of the main
reasons for George
Axelby’s reduced
involvement with the
Transactions was his interest in pro-
moting control in the international
control systems community. IFAC was
looking to develop an international
journal focused on automatic control
and was interested in converting the
journal Automatica, published by Perg-
amon Press, into an IFAC journal. In
1968, these two organizations
approached the one prominent editor
in the control field, George Axelby, to
become the editor of Automatica and
convinced him to accept the challenge
of developing another quality interna-
tional publication in the control field.
George Axelby soon realized that he
had no editorial board or associate
editors, so he set out to replicate the
editorial structure of the successful
IEEE Transactions on Automatic Control.
He recruited a new international edi-
torial board, one of whom was Huib-
ert Kwakernaak, and set out to find
suitable papers. He had the IFAC
 symposia papers as potential sources,
but they had to be peer reviewed by
referees selected by the associate edi-
tors. The first issue of the new IFAC
journal Automatica appeared in Jan-
uary, 1969. To date, Automatica re-
mains one of the leading journals in
the control field (the latest citation
impact factors for controls journals has
Automatica second after IEEE Transac-
tions on Automatic Control.).
George guided Automatica through
the growth years in our field in the
1970s. By 1979, it was clear that the
breadth of systems and control
research required an adaptation of the
editorial structure. He designed a new
editorial structure for Automatica to
distribute responsibilities by appoint-
ing area editors and changing the
position of editor to editor-in-chief. A
similar structure was eventually
adopted by IEEE Transactions on Auto-
matic Control nearly a decade later.
George remained as editor-in-chief of
Automatica until 1993, when interest in
Automatica increased its publication fre-
quency from six issues per year to
monthly. He was recognized by IFAC as
editor-in-chief emeritus and was suc-
ceeded by Huibert Kwakernaak, who
was then deputy editor-in-chief, as the
new editor-in-chief. I would be remiss
not to mention the significant contribu-
tions of Huibert to our Society, as a key
member of the editorial staff during
George’s 25 years and editor-in-chief of
Automatica for over a decade afterwards.
Huibert pioneered the use of informa-
tion technology in support of our publi-
cations, as the primary developer of the
paper submission and review system
Pampus that was used by Automatica
and as the codeveloper (with Pradeep
Misra) of our PaperPlaza conference
submission and publication system.
George Axelby’s last issue as editor-
in-chief of Automatica was the 150th
issue under his watch. In this issue, he
comments on the evolution of Automat-
ica from an applications-oriented jour-
nal toward a journal of control theory.
Of the early issues, he states “there
were no theorems, lemmas, or proofs,
as most papers do today… there was
less concentration on mathematical
aspects than there was on creating
algorithms for solving practical appli-
cations problems.” He noted a similar
transformation in IEEE Transactions on
Automatic Control, as he mentions in
another of his editorials on the subject
of application papers: “it is extremely
difficult to define an applications paper
particularly in the control field where a
mathematical theory is often applied to
solve a hypothetical control problem.”
He expected that, as the field matured,
more applications papers would be
published because control theory
would evolve to the point where it
should be verified by applications. He
foresaw the need for balance in our
publications between theory and appli-
cations and concluded that “Without
eventual application to the physical
world, control theory would stagnate
and become meaningless.”
To George, a good applications
paper, “in addition to giving a descrip-
tion of the system and its particular
features of interest, should contain the
evolution of the control design: its pur-
pose and desired performance, the the-
ory on which it was based, the reasons
for choosing the types of mechaniza-
tion and the problems of realizing it,
and finally, some measurements of
actual system performance…” These
standards are still the guidelines for
publications in our IEEE Transactions
on Control Systems Technology as well as
many of our technical articles in IEEE
Control Systems Magazine.
CSS annually awards the George S.
Axelby Outstanding Paper Award to
recognize outstanding papers pub-
lished in IEEE Transactions on Automat-
ic Control during the two preceding
years. This award was established in
1975 and is one of our most presti-
gious Society awards. George S. Axelby
is also listed in our IEEE Transactions
on Automatic Control editorial board as
the founding editor of the journal.
As our Society nears its 55th year
of operation, many of our pioneers
are no longer active in our activities
or in the control field. Their vision
and their efforts led to the creation of
our Society and our excellent publi-
cations. Our thanks go to George S.
Axelby for his crucial and inspira-
tional role in developing the founda-
tions of today’s CSS.
David A. Castañón

Worse Is Better
ecall, if you will, the trends of steam engine development as the nineteenth century wore
R on: increased flyball mass, better-engineered components and consequently reduced fric-
tion, faster engines and therefore smaller flywheel moments, striving toward astatic operation
and so reduced nonuniformity. Each and all of these trends led away from stable operations.
The puzzling increase in hunting behavior was now as clear as day. Simple changes could be
made to turn disgruntled and wayward factory engines into well-behaved workers: don’t oil
the governor, and replace the flyballs with smaller ones. In the long run better engine designs
prevailed, and new governors were developed that took account of Vyshnegradskii’s words.

—M. Denny, Ingenium: Five Machines That Changed the World.

Johns Hopkins University Press, Baltimore, MD, 2007, p. 154.

12 IEEE CONTROL SYSTEMS MAGAZINE » OCTOBER 2008