Michael Nowlin Caan | |
---|---|
Born | Ann Arbor, Michigan, USA | October 5, 1947
Nationality | American |
Alma mater | University of California, Los Angeles Ph.D. 1976 |
Known for | designing the AisleMaster wheelchair |
Scientific career | |
Fields | space science, technical design, tango dancing, therapy dog training |
Michael Nowlin Caan (October 5, 1947– ) is a physicist, technical inventor and designer, entrepreneur.
Biography
Early years
Michael Nowlin Caan was born in Ann Arbor Cite error: There are <ref>
tags on this page without content in them (see the help page). to parents Albert and Esther ('Piet') Caan. Michael was born while his mother was staying with her uncle, Professor William A. Paton. His father was a geophysicist doing geological work in Venezuela and Columbia at that time. Albert Caan's practical, problem-solving skills,[1] and his involvement in exploration foreshadowed Michael's later work as a designer and member of the NASA/Goddard Space Flight Center. The Caan family moved many times during Michael's childhood, linked to his father's petroleum exploration, including periods in the USA, Canada, Germany, India, Australia and the United Kingdom.
Michael's brother Woody[2] has a characteristic memory of their early travels: while flying over the Middle East one engine of their airliner caught fire, necessitating a diversion and emergency landing at Beirut, where the airport was closed by the fighting in Lebanon that preceded its national crisis. As the family evacuated the burning aircraft, ten-year-old Michael, deciding he wanted to explore Beirut while he was in the vicinity, wandered off on his own for hours and then returned nonchalantly to his frantic parents at the airport.
Michael went to the University of California at Berkeley for his undergraduate studies. During that period, Berkeley was seen as the epicentre of social change (e.g. the Summer of Love), also protest (e.g. at the People's Park), Berkeley. Michael graduated top of his class at Berkeley.
Career
Caan's early fieldwork for space science involved the Aurora Borealis, launching balloons carrying instrumentation from northern Canada. Over time, his work with NASA colleagues helped to develop new understanding of the magnetic field near Earth and then the changing properties of the solar wind. This work has enduring implications for worldwide telecommunications today and the safety of future inter-planetary voyagers.
Following a brief period serving in a US Government agency in Bethesda, he returned to Los Angeles where he launched and directed Columbia Medical Manufacturing. After a decade of 'high-tech' physics, Caan had decided to apply his innovative design skills to help people physically limited by disability: "Columbia Medical[3] began in 1978 when a scientist and inventor named Dr. Michael Caan took a friend’s advice and went into a niche market of products for children with disabilities."
Caan identified the poor quality of many previous designs used to assist children or adults with disabilities. Much of his work involved developmental or acquired neurodisability (e.g. from cerebral palsy to traumatic spinal cord injuries). Columbia Medical grew to become a national provider of innovative products. Crucial to Caan's approach to design and testing was his concern to value the experience and preferences of people with disabilities (and their families) in an exercise in collaborative development.
While his early successes were rugged aids for children (whose components were often assembled by adults with disabilities, across a network of collaborating workshops) his most innovative designs were for adults, such as a 'rickshaw' exerciser developed with paraplegic Vietnam veterans to suit their wheelchairs (illustrated here: http://pdf.medicalexpo.com/pdf/inspired/rickshaw-rehab-exerciser/84109-146289.html). His best-known product internationally was the AisleMaster chair, [4] the result of the Americans with Disabilities Act and advice from American Airlines. It could be used within aircraft and terminals around the world.[5] Christopher Reeve, the star of Superman, had always loved flight, and after his paralysis in an accident, Caan engineered a bespoke AisleMaster to enable Reeve to fly (even in a small private plane) once again.
Private life
The wilderness and wildlife of California have inspired Caan ever since he was an undergraduate at Berkeley. Every year he still goes to commune with Nature in a forest cabin with no modern 'conveniences', close to the Pacific Ocean (and the migration routes of passing humpback, grey and blue whales).[6]
After volunteering to design a feline house for her Burmese cats, Michael married Yvonne Ekman in Los Angeles in 1973 (divorced 2006). They have two daughters, Mrs. Sara van Leeuwen and Dr. Christina Caan.
After selling on Columbia Medical as a profitable corporation, Michael's enthusiasms took new directions. Foremost among these was ballroom dancing, especially the tango.[7], for which he travelled extensively, for example learning from experts in Argentina and Italy. After a period of successful competition dancing, he now concentrates on charity events, encouraging less experienced dancers and visiting Tango classes in many different places.[8]
As a child Michael showed a gift for establishing a rapport with various animals, even an ocelot he called 'Ocelito'. In recent years he has developed a new skill, with his partner Deborah McIntosh: training therapy dogs for patients of the John Wayne Cancer Institute.[9]
Writings
Four papers by Caan illustrate the development of his work in space science:
- "Solar Wind and Substorm-Related Changes in the Lobes of the Geomagnetic Tail", Journal of Geophysical Research, 1973
- "Substorm and Interplanetary Magnetic Field Effects on the Geomagnetic Tail Lobes" Journal of Geophysical Research, 1975
- "Characteristics of the Association Between the Interplanetary Magnetic Field and Substorms" Journal of Geophysical Research, 1977
- "The statistical magnetic signature of magnetospheric substorms" Planetary and Space Science, 1978
Caan belongs to a group in California known as the Camera Obscura Poets.
- "Henry’s Roofing Tar", 2016[10]
Patents
Early patents were for child safety equipment (such as his 1977 design US4157705). Dozens of patents were registered by Columbia Medical, including ground-breaking seating to enable children with cerebral palsy or athetosis to use conventional school desks, exercise equipment for adults with spinal injuries after a car crash to develop new upper body strength, and light-weight folding wheel chairs that give users with mobility problems use of public transport such as buses, trains or airliners.
Bibliography
- The magnetic effects of magnetospheric substorms Ph.D. thesis, University of California, Los Angeles, 1976 OCLC 10502370
- "Interplanetary Magnetic Field Changes and the Magnetotail" in: Akasofu Syun-Itchi (ed.) Dynamics of the Magnetosphere (Astrophysics and Space Science Library, 78), Dordrecht: Springer, 1979 ISBN 978-94-009-9521-5 OCLC 913815943
Honours and awards
Caan's passion for competitive dancing led to increasing involvement with USA Dance (for example the August/September 2004 issue of American Dancer features Caan dancing the tango as the front cover picture), and he was the first chapter president from Los Angeles County.
Notes and references
- ^ For example an optical recording apparatus for seismic waves in 1949.
- ^ Woody Caan.
- ^ See Columbia Medical website.
- ^ See AisleMaster unfoldable boarding wheelchair.
- ^ See "Imagination Takes Flight" The Exceptional Parent Vol. 29, No. 11 (Nov. 1999).
- ^ See Esalen Institute.
- ^ See Dancing with Meredith.
- ^ See [1].
- ^ See Pawsitive Pet Program.
- ^ See page 29 in this anthology https://www.cabrillo.edu/publications/portergulch/2016/PGR-2016.pdf.