Elmer Kaprielian

As a Class of ’42 School of Engineering graduate, Elmer Kaprielian learned the kind of electrical engineering that we all take for granted today.

“It was about electricity.We learned about motors and transformers and generators and switches,” he says. It wasn’t about information technology, biotechnology or nanotechnology. “None of these things function if you don’t have reliable and economic, commercial electric power. It all amounts to zero, absolute zero, when the lights go out.”

After a stint as a reserve officer in the Navy, Kaprielian went to work in 1946 as an estimator for Pacific Gas and Electric Co. and retired 41 years later as senior vice president for Power Generation and Transmission. He takes great pride in the fact that during the 18 years he managed the department, the lights stayed on.

California’s power problems in recent years and the blackout last August over large areas of the East Coast and the Midwest, are a reminder that we can no longer take reliable electric power for granted. Kaprielian suggests that electric power should be on the agenda of engineering schools.

“I’m just a bystander now who has never lost interest in the thing that got me into electrical engineering,” he says.When the State of California began licensing engineers in the late 1940’s, Kaprielian decided to get the license, although it was not a requirement, and he therefore holds license #342.

“I love engineering,” he says.

Elmer Kaprielian was not the first Kaprielian to attend the School. His father, Michael Kaprielian (BS ’13) graduated as an engineer in 1913 when Engineering was part of USC’s Physics department. His older brother Roy Kaprielian (BSCH ’43) received a chemical engineering degree. However, his son Douglas Dean Kaprielian, got his USC degree in business and finance.

Kaprielian says he has known all of the School’s deans, including Zohrab Kaprielian to whom he is not related.

“He was a good friend and I used to visit him a couple of times a year. He got his first degree in the Near East, in a part of the world where being an Armenian wasn’t easy.

“I’m not the scholar that he was,” adds Kaprielian. At USC, Kaprielian played in the Trojan Band and lived in a dormitory a block from the School. “Several of the happiest years of my life were spent at USC.”