The Coordinate Metrology Society just wrapped up its 40^th conference. Justin Novak talks about what’s next for the society, the future (and past) of electric vehicles, and how to do well at your next CMSC 5K.

Look for Justin’s latest column: Metrology and the EV Revolution

Novak is current chair of the executive committee of the Coordinate Metrology Society. He is also the manager for Quality, Continuous Improvement, and Training for the Metrology group at Newport News Shipbuilding, where he has been active in the metrology field for 19 years.

Michelle: So tell us, how was CMSC this year?

Justin: Oh man, it went great. It was, being in Charlotte was fantastic. It was a great location, easy to get to. The weather played nicely with us. We got out of that awful heat wave. And the attendance was really good. So we had, I had thought set up the conference pretty optimistically. And we went well beyond everything I had planned for as far as attendance goes. Had a great state of speakers.

I ended up with three different keynotes, all inventors of some sort of significant technology within our field. And then the show floor was just fantastic. There was a lot of cool tech out there, a lot of emerging tech, and just a lot of time for the vendors and attendees to spend time talking about the challenges and the opportunities that matter to them.

Michelle: That's really exciting. Was there anything that you thought was especially interesting or kind of new that you learned this year?

Justin: You know, for us, with it being the 40th anniversary, I kind of talked about it a second ago, but the ability to sit and listen to some of these folks, you know, we had Dr. Lau who co-invented the laser tracker.

Able to talk about his journey and what was happening back then and what challenges he was trying to solve to invent this piece of equipment that we know and use every single day was really, really interesting. And then the same thing was true for John Brown with photogrammetry. And then we didn't talk about laser projection so much, which was what our third speaker was invented, but he talked about what was going on in metrology at the time and a lot of the things that influenced his career. And if you look at significant kind of metrology research, it's hard to find very large gaps for John Palma to hear his name isn't all over things that were happening at the time. So for me, the highlight was really getting to sit down and listen to those keynote speakers, to be honest.

Yeah, definitely. It's funny. Some of those technologies just seem like they've been around forever. But of course, they had to be invented at some point and that one point didn't exist. So yeah, yeah, I think that's the neat thing about our field is it, you know, when you think about it, it's not. It is we've been measuring things, obviously, for a long, long time. You know, I think I heard that I haven't substantiated this, but I believe that the Theodolite is probably the piece of equipment we still use that has been used back as far in antiquity as we know. And I think I heard one time that the name Theodolite is like a rough translation or a, you know, the word has slightly changed where it initially was named the hand of God, I think, or something like that, because it was so important in making construction happen. And so we tend to think like, oh yeah, we've been using this type of technology for so long, but really a lot of the stuff that we have now is, you know, the folks in the minute are still alive and still in the business and we can still go talk to them. And it's, you know, there's not a lot of industries that can boast that for sure. Definitely, like you say, they're still around and still able to talk about their work. So that's very exciting. And then just kind of speaking of things you learn or know.