Professor Yau Jing-Po & Cheng Kung University (NCKU)

Professor Yau Jing-Po & Cheng Kung University (NCKU)

Written by Li-Chang Kuo

On the 29^th 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.