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December 27, 1998
O. Struger, 67, a Pioneer in Automation
By STEVEN E. BRIER
r. Odo Struger, who invented the programmable logic controller, which makes possible modern factory automation, amusement-park rides and lavish stage effects in Broadway productions, died on Dec. 8 in Cleveland. He was 67.
He had thyroid cancer, family members said.
The device Struger invented, essentially a rugged computer that controls machinery, was based on a concept developed in his doctoral dissertation at the Technical University of Austria. It is now used in factories throughout the world.
Struger left the university in 1956 for a job at Asea Brown Boveri, a Swiss power company. While there, he completed his dissertation, "The Process for Quantitative Handling of Positioning Errors of Numerical Control Machines."
His paper led to a job in 1958 as a research engineer at Allen-Bradley in Milwaukee, where he headed the team that developed the programmable logic controller, or PLC, creating a billion-dollar-a-year business.
Murray Slovick, editor of Spectrum, the magazine of the Institute for Electrical and Electronics Engineers, said: "Simply put, programmable logic controllers are what industry uses to automate factories. They are used to control a wide range of equipment, everything from heating, ventilation, air conditioning, to plastic injection molding machines to commercial washing machines to conveyor lines."
Struger's invention has branched out from its blue-collar beginnings. "PLCs are pervasive," said William Little, chief technical officer at Rockwell Automation, Allen-Bradley's parent division. "They show up in the road production of 'Phantom of the Opera' and in rides at Disney World."
Little said the devices were designed to work in real time, taking in information, processing it and producing commands to control a mechanical process as it happens.
Struger had a long list of awards and technical achievements; he received the Prometheus Medal for technical innovation in 1996, the same year it was awarded to Leonardo da Vinci. Struger was also a fellow of the Institute for Electrical and Electronics Engineers. He held 50 patents and published more than 40 professional papers; a laboratory at the Technical University of Austria was recently named after him.
Struger was an avid outdoorsman, said Karen Costantino-Struger, a daughter-in-law. He skied throughout his youth, winning a spot on Austria's all-academic team and becoming an alternate for the Austrian Olympic ski team, she said. He became a professional ski instructor, taught his sons to ski, and in 1991, when he was 60, won a national skiing title for his age group.
Struger was born in Austria in 1931 and lived in Cleveland, where he had been a vice president for Allen-Bradley until retiring last year.
He is survived by his wife, Marlene; two sons, Andre, of Farmington Hills, Mich., and Gregory, of Newbury, Ohio; a sister, Franziska Panger of Austria, and three grandchildren.
