No one was surprised when Edward Wall chose electrical engineering for a career.
As a child he built a crystal radio set, and was a ham radio operator before he was a teenager.
Later on, he figured out how to light up the night sky in his Brooklyn neighborhood by stringing wires across the tops of buildings, using a motorized pulley. The contraption shot a trail of colorful sparks across the sky and was sure to gather a crowd.
“That was in the days when electricity was mystical,” said Wall’s son, Ed Wall of Denver.
The senior Wall, who was dubbed “Genie,” short for genius, when he was younger, died May 10 at a Denver nursing home. He was 85.
Wall was an engineer for years, working for General Electric, Martin Marietta (now Lockheed Martin) and the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation.
He taught engineering at the University of Colorado, Lehigh University in Bethlehem, Pa., the University of Maine in Bangor, and California Polytechnic College (now California Polytechnic State University) in San Luis Obispo, Calif.
But what pleased his kids was his infallible help with their school science projects.
“He was a great fix-it person,” said his daughter, Peg Wall of Denver. Gifts to his children were often chemistry sets, microscopes or geology sets, she said.
She described her dad as a “brainy, ivory tower” kind of person who thought television was a “waste of time” unless there was a show on World War II or something about science fiction. “I didn’t realize for a long time that everyone else watched sports on TV,” she said.
When younger, Edward Wall and his brothers built a sailboat out of pieces of a boat they found near their Brooklyn home, and sailed the finished product up and down the East Coast. Edward later repeated the feat with his son by building a boat for the family to use on Carter Lake in Colorado.
While teaching at CU, Wall patented a system for extracting oil from shale by using microwaves.
Edward Thomas Wall was born in Brooklyn, N.Y., on May 16, 1920, and graduated from Brooklyn Technical High School. He attended Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy, N.Y.
He married Catherine Kennelly in 1947.
He was a sergeant in the Army Signal Corps and then returned to Purdue University to finish his bachelor’s degree. He earned his master’s from Lehigh University and a Ph.D. from the University of Denver.
In addition to his son and daughter, he is survived by his wife, Catherine Wall of Centennial, and two other daughters, Barbara Wall of Desert Springs, Calif., and Sheila Wall of Cincinnati; three grandchildren; and a brother, Bill Wall of California.
Staff writer Virginia Culver can be reached at 303-820-1223 or vculver@denverpost.com.
