Father-son duo rose to top of engineering community

What makes an engineer?

For Ed and Sheldon Silberman, it's in the genes.

The father-and-son duo, both of Golden Valley, together have 86 years of experience in engineering, and they were honored on the same night last month for their contributions to the field.

It was a long path to get to that stage.

The father, Ed Silberman, now 94, had a passion for engineering before he even knew what it was. As a kid, he used to dream of building a canal from the Missouri River to his tiny town of Streeter, N.D., and he would practice redirecting water in the tracks of horse-drawn buggies in the alley behind his home.

"It was just childhood play, but nonetheless useful," he said.

His child's play turned out to be a tiny likeness of the hydrology work that would dominate his career at the University of Minnesota's St. Anthony Falls Laboratory, where he harnessed the power of the Mississippi River for several decades.

For his lifetime of accomplishments, he was the recipient of the Charles W. Britzius Distinguished Engineer Award, given by the Minnesota Federation of Engineering to the engineer who best exhibits longstanding dedication and service to the field.

"I've been a lifetime doer of small things, and I did it reasonably well," he said.

Many of the 300 engineers who were there to honor him during the award presentation had been his students.

After graduating from the University of Minnesota in 1936 with a master's degree in civil engineering, Silberman returned 10 years later to begin teaching. He was a professor there until 1981 and remained an adjunct until 1988.

Teaching was his proudest work, he said.

Not surprisingly, Ed's son Sheldon, 56, was drawn to engineering at an early age. He remembers having a little work station next to his father's at their Robbinsdale home and taking trips to the St. Anthony lab to see where his dad worked.

He would watch captivated as the Mississippi roared through the middle of his dad's building three stories down. When he finally was old enough to study electrical engineering at the University of Minnesota, the two would carpool together to campus.

One thing Sheldon never did, though, was take one of his father's classes.

Being in two very different fields of engineering, their areas of expertise don't overlap much, but their careers do have one commonality: a focus on environmental awareness.

Ed one was one of the first in his profession to discuss care for the environment in engineering, and he taught the first classes at the university that included the concept as a focus.

Now, more than 40 years later, Sheldon is doing work in one of the newest branches of green engineering -- renewable energy wind farms. He led the highly ambitious project for Xcel Energy that created a 200-mile network to bring energy from windmills in southern Minnesota to the Twin Cities.

The project, which included 150 new power lines and 55 substations, was like building a freeway where there once was only a dirt road, he said.

For his work, the Minnesota Society of Professional Engineers honored Sheldon with a Merit Award.

It was especially rewarding to take the stage on the same night his father received his lifetime achievement award, he said.

"I could see it in his face when people came up to say hi," Sheldon said. "It was very nice for him to be recognized."

For a man who was there to see and contribute to many of the monumental steps engineering took during the 20th century, Ed doesn't have much to say about the changes he's seen over the years -- other than to note that the slide rule is no longer king.

Rather, engineering in its purest form is really the same, he says. A desire to understand how things work, and improve upon it, is the common bond shared by all engineers, Sheldon said.

"I couldn't imagine a world without it," Ed Silberman said.

Erik Borg is a University of Minnesota journalism student on assignment for the Star Tribune.