R. Tom Sawyer

[11][12][13] The ASME established the R. Tom Sawyer Award[14] to honor him for advancing gas turbine technology in all of its aspects for over 40 years.

[15] Sawyer was born on June 20, 1901, in Schenectady, New York, but lived most of his life in Ho-Ho-Kus, New Jersey (Ridgewood, Bergen County).

After receiving his undergraduate degree, Sawyer began working for General Electric, where he designed and developed early diesel locomotives.

He determined, however, that the electrical parts were too heavy and expensive to be practical, so he discontinued the project and donated the Jordan car to the Mechanical Engineering laboratory at Ohio State University.

[2] In 1929, Sawyer visited Dr. Alfred Büchi, the Swiss inventor of supercharging, when Buchi was testing the turbocharger on a large diesel engine in the Sulzer Winterthur plant.

Sawyer then joined the American Locomotive Company, where he served as head of research working on both diesel and gas turbine projects from 1930 to 1956.

Sawyer worked as a technical advisor to the U.S. Army during the 1950s, where he helped develop application of gas turbines through mechanical drive to a locomotive which was the first step in applying nuclear power to military transportation.

Sawyer commissioned a jeweler in New York City to make a die to cast a miniature multi-bladed axial-flow turbine "wheel" lapel pin.

In 1964, Sawyer contacted the Broadway ASCAP songwriter Arthur Kent,[19] most famous for The End of the World,[20] to compose IGTI's song Onward and Upward with Gas Turbines[21] which was later modernized by a Nashville lyricist.

The award is given annually at IGTI's international Turbo Expo[15] to "an individual who has made important contributions to advance the purpose of the Gas Turbine Institute over a substantial period of time".