Footsteps in the Sand

About the Book

My book deals with my life from birth until the present time. It is about our family and our problems, our joys and our trials, and tribulations. I try to portray my schooling, my work, and my accomplishments. I did a lot of traveling for my work. I designed and installed SVCs in fourteen different states, fourteen foreign countries, and five Canadian provinces.

About the Author

My name is William Knippschild. I am an eighty-five-year-old male presently living in Pawleys Island, South Carolina, with my wife, two sons, and a grandson. By profession, I am an electrical engineer. I was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, but I was raised in Germany prior to and during World War II, being bombed by my own people, by the Eighth Air Force. In 1948, I returned to the United States of America, where I learned my first profession, radio and TV repair. In January 1952, I was drafted into the US Marine Corps, where I learned and taught radar. After serving my tour of duty, I returned to radio and TV repair. In 1956, I started at Drexel Institute of Technology (now Drexel University) to get my BS in electrical engineering at night, and I continued on to get my master’s degree in control engineering. While attending Drexel, I started working for the GE Switchgear Works at their testing laboratory on Lindbergh Boulevard in Southwest Philadelphia—first as an engineering assistant and then became the instrumentation engineer upon graduating from Drexel. In 1976, I switched jobs within GE and became the control engineer for some equipment called SVC (static VAR compensator). It was specialty equipment employed by steel mills and utilities. After retiring from GE in 1993, I continued to work as a consultant to CANA, a subsidiary of Alsthom of France, which was also in the SVC business. In 2006, I retired with my family to Pawleys Island, South Carolina.