Victor Paschkis Papers

Victor Paschkis was born in Vienna, Austria in 1898. There he earned three engineering degrees from the Institute of Technology. Paschkis was brought up as a Roman Catholic, but very much influenced by his mother's philosophy of compassion and love, he joined the Religious Society of Friends (Quakers). According to his memoirs, Paschkis published an anti-war book during World War I with the French writer, Barbusse, though Paschkis was a soldier in the Austro-Hungarian army on the Eastern Front. He moved his family to another part of Europe after hearing Hitler's promise about "rivers of blood" flowing; both he and his wife were part Jewish. He emigrated, along with his wife and children, to the United States in 1938.

Victor Paschkis was an outspoken opponent of the development of nuclear weapons, turning down the opportunity to work on the Manhattan Project, which developed the atom bomb. Paschkis served as the chairman of the National Friends Conference on Race Relations, the American Friends Service Committee's Race Relations Committee, and the Committee on Fair Employment. After retiring from his profession, he became active in the Society of Friends Fellowship House in Philadelphia (Pennsylvania) and its Fellowship Farm in Pottstown (Pennsylvania).

Paschkis' career as a mechanical engineer was long and influential; his writings on heat transfer were known around the world. He was the founder in 1949, and first president, of the Society for Social Responsibility in Science, arguing that scientists and engineers could not ignore their consciences while at work but should behave as moral people there too. In 1972, Paschkis was a principal founder of the Technology and Society Division of ASME. At about the same time he also helped to form the Committee for Social Responsibility in Engineering, which evolved into the IEEE Committee on the Social Implications of Technology. At Columbia University's School of Engineering he was the technical director of the Heat and Mass Flow Analyzer Laboratory for a quarter-century before his retirement in 1966. While at Columbia, he refused to build an analog computer to do research into the mechanics of heat transfer until the university agreed not to use the computer for military applications. Some of the equipment he built while at Columbia was later used in a NASA moon-landing mission.

Paschkis' first wife, Susanne Mugdan, died in 1959. They had two children, Maria and Albert. Paschkis met his second wife, Marjorie Penny, at Fellowship Farm, where he lived and for which she was the director (along with Fellowship House; Marjorie died in 1983.

Victor Paschkis lived until he was 93; he died at the Frederick Mennonite Home (Pennsylvania) in 1991.