"Joe" as all his friends and associates called him, started his education by walking 5 miles every day on a dirt road to a
one-room schoolhouse in Sleepy Eye, Minnesota. In his teens he spent his summers herding cattle on horseback and harvesting
wheat on thrashing crews from sun-up to sun-down.
In his early twenties he earned college tuition as a foundry man pouring ingots of molten iron at Western Electric. His interest
in transportation issues was launched when he learned the tool and die trade, manufacturing tire tread molds for Goodyear.
Joe received his B.A. in Physics in 1931 and his M.S. in Spectroscopy in 1934 at the University of Alberta at Edmonton.
During World War Two, he was over the age limit for military service so he contributed to the war effort by designing the
remote control gun turret system on the Boeing B-29 "Super Fortress." In addition he developed the periscope gun-aiming system
for the Douglas A-26 and B-26 attack bombers.
In 1945, following the war, Joe moved his wife and two children to Pasadena, California, where he used his physics background
to design movie cameras used by the major Hollywood studios.
In 1947, he moved to Pacific Palisades and accepted a position as Assistant Professor in UCLA's newly formed College of Engineering.
His instruction in the areas of machine design, mechanism and kinematics at UCLA spanned more than 25 years.
In 1959 he earned his Doctor Ingeneur in Kinematics from the Technical University of Hannover, Germany. At the time no American
University offered an advanced degree in Kinematics which Joe defined as: "The study of the effects of velocity and acceleration
upon mass, with respect to the position and attitude of that mass."
Joe's legacy to the world, for which he is fondly remembered, include his thousands of UCLA students scattered all over the
globe, his many publications on mechanism and kinematics, and the vector force system of kinematics analyses which Joe refined
during his many years of teaching kinematics.
Perhaps his most reputable work was his research on the dynamic axle weights of heavy trucks. It resulted in the Beggs/Chiang
Hypothesis which states that the sum of the dynamic axle weights exceeds the sum of the static axle weights by the spike load
of the pitching about the center of mass upon initial braking of a 2 axle vehicle. That is to say, the weight of the vehicle
dramatically increases when the driver applies the brakes. This effect is heavily pronounced in heavy-duty trucks.
