This centenary issue offers a wonderful opportunity for me to express appreciation to the hundreds( perhaps even thousands) of people who I met and who contributed to INMR since it was first founded during the summer of 1993.
People who took time to explain what is happening on their power networks, people who discussed service problems and how they are dealing with them, people who showed me around substations, people who accompanied me to inspect overhead lines, people who took me into their test laboratories, into high voltage halls, into factories, into universities, into research institutes, …
Pages 26 to 36 provide vintage photos of just a sampling of these many individuals – all as generous with their time as with their abundant knowledge – who together helped launch and shape INMR’ s development, especially over the early years. Remember now, it’ s been two decades and some do look younger … I suppose in our high voltage field we’ ve all been exposed to some‘ natural ageing’.
Gratitude Due to So Many … But Especially to Anders Bohm
There’ s one person, however, who deserves special mention … someone without whom INMR would never have been possible. Many believe that their fate lies in their own hands. That they alone determine their destiny. Perhaps this is true in large measure. But one always has to allow for external circumstances( call it luck or call it chance) that‘ open a door’. If that door never opens, we also never get the opportunity to take control over the future direction of our lives.
In my own case, Anders Bohm was the person who opened that door when he engaged me as a consultant to study developments in the world market for insulators. Until that day in 1989 when I first met him in Stockholm, I didn’ t know the difference between an insulator and a pitchfork. But Anders hired me nonetheless because during that face-to-face meeting, I managed to convince him that, while I was certainly no expert on insulators, what I was good at was collecting and analyzing information. Anders, along with partners, Peter Larsson and the late Lennart Rundcrantz, had just orchestrated a management buy-out of several large insulator factories in Europe and merged them under a newly formed group called Ceram. Now, they wanted to assess international opportunities and plan new directions to grow this business.
After a few years working alongside Anders and his colleagues in Sweden, Germany, Austria, France and Slovakia, I had the sudden idea of starting a journal focusing on insulators and to be called INSULATOR NEWS & MARKET REPORT( ergo the current name INMR). There seemed so many changes taking place in this field and the industry was not being well served with technical and commercial information. However, before launching it, I felt it proper to ask Anders for his permission to use the knowledge I had acquired working for him to serve the insulator industry at large. He not only gave me his blessing to proceed but also became our first subscriber and also our very first advertiser.
And so, to Anders … to my colleagues and columnists, to the numerous contributors, industry experts, technical specialists, researchers, power engineers, high voltage professionals and Professors featured in all our 100 issues going back 20 years … a truly profound and heartfelt thanks. You’ re the ones who made INMR what it is today!
Publisher
2 20
YEARS
Q2 2013