Lynn Beedle ‘52

1947 – Accepts position as a member of Lehigh’s civil engineering faculty

Lynn Simpson Beedle was the founder and long-time director of the Council on Tall Buildings and Urban Habitat which had an enormous influence on the world’s view of modern sky scrapers. During his half a century of work at Lehigh, he helped generate a steady stream of international visibility for the engineering school thanks in part to his work at Fritz Lab.

Beedle was born in San Francisco in 1918 at the conclusion of the First World War. He made his home in the Bay Area for the first thirty years of his life and attended UC Berkley where he received a B.S. in civil engineering. During WWII he was recruited by the Navy to perform underwater explosion research at the Norfolk Shipyard in Virginia. He met his future wife Ella while he was in the service, and together they had four sons and a daughter. In 1946, he was the officer-in-charge for the Bikini Atomic Bomb Tests that were conducted by the Navy in preparation for the attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

Beedle came to Lehigh in 1947 as an instructor in civil engineering. He enrolled in the university’s engineering graduate school and in 1949 received his M.S. Three years later he completed his Ph.D., and in 1957 was promoted to a full professor. Lehigh’s Fritz Lab, named after the original university trustee and Bethlehem Iron Works founder (which later became Bethlehem Steel), had just received a major addition in 1955 and was hailed as the world’s most impressive structural testing facility. Beedle was named Fritz Lab Director of Research in 1960, a position he held until the mid-1980s. Under his leadership, countless industry and federally funded research projects occurred between the facility’s walls, including tests on the steel used for several major bridges, skyscrapers, and the Telstar Satellite, the world’s first broadband satellite. Beedle’s areas of expertise in structural research included plastic design in steel, column stability, high-strength bolting, and weld beam-to-column connections.

In 1969, Beedle founded the Council on Tall Buildings and Urban Habitats at Lehigh. Over the next three decades, he propelled the organization to high levels of success that brought him and the Engineering College world-wide recognition. The Council website describes it as “an international non-profit organization sponsored by architectural, engineering, planning, and construction professionals, established to facilitate professional exchanges among those involved in all aspects of the planning, design, construction and operation of tall buildings and the urban habitat.” Today the organization boasts over 1500 members. Beedle personally mediated the Council’s debate in 1996 over the world’s tallest building, which was between Chicago’s Sears Tower and Malaysia’s Petronas Towers. He concluded that the Sears Tower’s 253 foot antenna wasn’t an integral part of the structure and was therefore shorter than the Petronas Towers (the current tallest building in the world is Taipei 101 in Taiwan).

Beedle’s accomplishments brought him practically every prestigious award in civil engineering. In 1972, the same year he helped organize the first international conference on tall buildings, Beedle was given a membership in the National Academy of Engineering, the industry’s highest recognition. In 1978, Lehigh honored him with the title of Distinguished Professor of Civil Engineering. He received the John Fritz Medal, the Berkley Engineering Alumni Society Distinguished Engineering Alumnus Award, and the 1982 Franklin Institute’s Frank P. Brown Medal for his contributions to structural steel research. He was author, co-author, or editor of over 200 books, papers, and articles, including the five-volume monograph Planning and Design of Tall Buildings, and was named one of the top 125 people in his field in the last 125 years by Engineering News Record.

 

     

P.C. Rossin College of Engineering and Applied Science
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