University Times

Like most of the equipment he created for Pitt’s engineering school, Earle N. Hewitt III was one of a kind.

“Earle specialized in making sophisticated equipment for experiments dealing with oxidation of metals and alloys,” said Frederick S. Pettit, a professor in the materials science and engineering department, where Hewitt was a research specialist for the last 27 years.

“We would tell Earle something like: ‘We need a piece of equipment that will cycle metal specimens from 1,200 degrees centigrade to room temperature in 10 seconds,’ and Earle would go out and build it. He needed very little guidance,” Pettit said.

Hewitt, 69, died in his sleep June 10, 2003, at his home in Munhall.

“I don’t see how we’ll be able to replace him,” said Pettit.

An avid reader, Hewitt never earned a college degree yet mastered subjects ranging from metallurgy to electrical circuitry.

“He was always coming home from the library with an armload of books,” said Hewitt’s wife, Catherine, whom he married six months before coming to Pitt from a research job at Mellon Institute.

“He had such a phenomenal mind,” she said. “If Earle needed to learn about something, he would read about it and teach himself. We hardly ever had to buy any new appliances because he kept fixing them.”

John A. Barnard, chairperson of Pitt’s materials science and engineering department, called Hewitt “a very well-read, basically quiet individual. The kinds of skills he had, you can’t learn in school anymore.

“Earle started out at Mellon Institute in an era when lots of things were still being built from the ground up. Today, most everything is computer-based. But when you do live experiments, you still often need to maintain and repair older equipment or design new equipment for specialized purposes.”

Hewitt played a critical role in training graduate students, Barnard and Pettit agreed.

“Some graduate students, when they first come in, are not too squared away on experimental techniques. Earle would work with them on that,” said Pettit, who heads the engineering school’s high-temperature corrosion research group along with fellow materials science professor Gerald Meier. Hewitt worked with the group for the last 23 years.

Despite Hewitt’s voracious appetite for work and learning, he was “a wonderfully devoted father and husband” who helped in home-schooling his daughters, Catherine Hewitt said.

He also was a talented organist, she added. Typically, he taught himself to play by ear, and did repair work on a succession of tube organs before finally buying a solid-state model.

Hewitt is survived by his wife; daughters Bonnie Rose Hewitt of Pitcairn and Sarah Cathleen and Bethany Alice Hewitt of Munhall, and two grandchildren.

The family requests that books or donations for books be made to Carnegie Library of Homestead.

— Bruce Steele