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7
NTVA 60
TH
ANNIVERSARY
– MEETING AND DINNER
In 2014 the NTVA Board planned marking of the
Academy’s 60
th
Anniversary with the wish that each city
with an NTVA branch should arrange its own
Anniversary celebration. These celebrations in Bergen,
Oslo and Stavanger are described elsewhere in this
Review.
In the evening of 9
th
September 2015 an Anniversary
meeting and dinner was held at the Lerchendal Estate
in Trondheim, NTVA headquarters. It was a large,
festive group that assembled in the hearth room to hear
Johannes Moe,
who among other posts has served as
the NTVA president from 1993 to 1998, speak on the
background for the founding of the NTVA.
A brief extract:
On the 9
th
of September, 1955, NTVA was established after
various organizational solutions had been evaluated. The
NTVA mission statement was succinct:
The goal of the Norwegian Academy of Technological
Sciences is to promote the technological sciences and
ancillary natural sciences and to motivate scientific work
in technical fields in our country using means including
meetings with lectures and discussions, demonstrations and
excursions, publication of scientific works, etc.
When NTVA was founded, there were only three such
Academies worldwide, all in the Nordic countries. The
first was IVA established in Sweden in 1919 and now the
world’s oldest. Finland and Denmark came later. There’s
good reason to be pleased that the fourth was our own
Academy of Technological Sciences, established in 1955.
In the 50 years that followed, Academies of Techno-
logical Sciences were established in increasingly more
countries, such by the year 2000 there were 40. The
National Academy of Engineering was established in 1964
in the USA, the Royal Academy of Engineering in 1976 in
Great Britain, and the Chinese Academy of Engineering
in 1994. A greater number of Academies were founded in
the 1990s. A coordinating entity for the Academies, the
Council of Academies of Engineering and Technological
Sciences (CAETS), was founded in 1978.
For its first 30 years, NTVA activities focused on internal
social and professional functions, as meeting places for
members. This was in accordance with the international
tradition of Academies. Sweden’s IVA was an exception
in that it also had an important role as consultant to and
collaborator with the country’s authorities. In Norway
that role already was principally the responsibility of
the Research Councils. In the late 1980s NTVA changed
its pace with a more outgoing profile and burgeoning
activities. Professor Harald A. Øye then was the NTVA
president. An industrial council with representatives of
leading Norwegian industries was established in 1990.
The Academy’s Mission Statement, which had been
unchanged since 1995, was amended in 1991 with the
statement that it should work
for the benefit of Norwegian
society and the development of Norwegian industry.
During the anniversary meeting, Professor
Trond Øivind
Jørgensen
at The Arctic University of Norway, Tromsø
was awarded the
NTVA Special Prize
for breakthrough
research in 2015.
Nobel Laureates May-Britt and Edvard
Moser
were awarded certificates attesting to their being
named honorary members of the Academy in 2014.