Professor Yau Jing-Po
& Cheng Kung University
(NCKU)
Written by Li-Chang Kuo
On the 29th day of January in 1998, when I did the final
visit to Professor Yao Jing-Po (姚靜波) at NCKU (National Cheng Kung University), he told me that “I am already
82 year-old…” so that he’s supposed to be born in 1916, and this year he should
be 100 year-old. Professor Yau served in the Department of Electrical
Engineering at NCKU since 1949, after he conveyed the arsenal of ‘504’ from Northeast China to Tainan, Taiwan.
Professor
Yau who taught his students always patiently to foster many talented
people as social assets for the global society.
Destiny is very fantastic. There is one mystery power connecting a
node with another node to be a network. In 1964, my father pulled my hand to the
Cheng Kung University,
and introduced me in Japanese to Professor Yau. I saw a skinny and
tall man but he’s smiling for he just married with my aunt. (Time flies over
the past five decades in blink of an eye) Thereafter, Professor Yau became my
help, and indirectly achieved Taiwan’s
Precision Industry as a frontier in the new era.
I heard that Professor Yau was born in Harbin, and he gained a scholarship to study in Canada as graduated
from college. When Cheng Kung University
upgraded from Provincial to National University in 1971, the School re-examined all the
teachers’ qualification; unfortunately, Professor Yau’s diploma certificates and
his personal belongings were missing during he was commanded to convey the
arsenal to Taiwan in the
civil war of China’s
Liaoshen Campaign. He was very anxious to contact his alma mater; at last, I
was glad that he eventually solved his problem and could keep his teaching job
and contributing his expertise more than four decades.
I received my first purchasing order from an American firm in
December 1966, but when the goods which I made delivered to the said firm, one
guy mocked me that “If one note says ‘free of charge’ in those provisions of
the purchasing order, we do not have to pay you any penny!” I was scared to search
for the provisions at once, but my interpreting ability was low because I was just
a 13 year-old boy after all. I immediately thought of Professor Yau and was
hurry to Cheng Kung University
to ask for help. Thank my Lord, everything was OK, and I thus improved my interpreting
ability since Professor Yau’s instruction.
In 1970, the vacuum tube was decided to be eliminated from the
electric appliances, we must update to the era of transistor, but ‘no one knows
what is transistor’; consequently, I went to NCKU to ask Professor Yau’s help
and then received the purchasing order from a buyer of New
York, and Tainan City became the leading city of transistor products
in Taiwan,
the influences are continued till today.
In 1973, I was noticed that
NCSIST (National Chung-Shan Institute of Science & Technology) projected
developing a new missile—named ‘Brave Wind’ (Hsiung Feng) which required one kind
of coil; I still went to NCKU to ask Professor Yau’s help, he reminded me a ‘Principle of Faraday’s Right Hand’, Faraday’s
research on the magnetic field around a conductor carrying a direct current
that meant ‘Corona Discharge’, and “A Corona Discharge is an electrical
discharge brought on by the ionization of a fluid surrounding a conductor that
is electrically charged. Corona discharge may arise from other conductors
carrying alternating current at very high voltages, such as long-distance transmission
lines and high-power short-wave transmitting antennae.” Therefore, the copper
wire just to extrude to be very fine—the diameter less than human hair, then
the coil could be achieved to meet the requirement. We finished one more job
together, and the missile succeeded to launch in 1975.
Professor Yau can be sure is a great
scholar; because of his introduction, I met Professor Ma Chen-Chiu
and learnt the ‘Mechanical Introduction’ to resolve a lot of problems. As to my
invention of ‘Power Chip’ for actuating the contactless TranSmart card with its
reader (RF Transmitter) to transmit and/or receive radio signals that idea also
came from Professor Yau’s ‘Ion Impacting Method’. Nowadays, the TranSmart card
constructing an ‘EPS’ (electronic payment system) to do the cashless
transaction is being applied in the modern societies of the worldwide. However,
today I can not find the name of Professor Yau Jing-Po on-line, nor
in the website of NCKU. Nevertheless, I wrote this article to salute Professor
Yau’s contribution.
