Alumni Profiles

Air Care Verne Brown '60 founded a firm to monitor volatile gases By Kristin Duisberg

When a certain type of industrial accident makes the news, Verne Brown '60 knows chances are good he'll get a phone call.

As president and chairman of ENMET Corp., a manufacturer of vapor and gas detection systems, Brown is a leading authority on explosion accidents that happen as a result of a buildup of toxic gases in confined spaces. Twice a year, on average, he flies to some corner of the United States to serve as an expert witness in lawsuits involving death by explosion or exposure, typically offering his expertise on behalf of the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA). From sewer line explosions to cases where workers have perished inside cement trucks or tank trailers, his role is to provide an opinion about whether a fatality was the result of negligence or conditions that couldn't have been controlled. "My job is to make sure the lawyers don't get away with silly science," he says.

Brown grew up in post-Depression era New Hampshire in a house that straddled the Dover-Madbury town line, a stone's throw from the Kingman farm property now owned by UNH. His father drove a truck for the Elliott Rose Company in Madbury, N.H., and his mother worked for UNH as a housekeeper at Congreve Hall—an arrangement that allowed him to enroll at UNH on a "staff scholarship" following three years of Marine Corps service in the Korean War. A standout athlete and Dover High School valedictorian for the class of 1953, Brown brought his considerable academic and athletic talents to UNH. He played one season of hockey on the Jackson Landing outdoor rink and four years of football under famed UNH coach Clarence "Chief" Boston, and when he graduated in 1960, he was the first to achieve a perfect 4.0 in electrical engineering.

After graduation, an elite National Electronics Conference scholarship took him to the University of Michigan, where he earned master's degrees in engineering and physics and then a doctoral degree in electrical engineering. Brown formed ENMET in 1970, the same year that both OSHA and the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) were established. He says the timing is no coincidence.

"In keeping with many other social changes that came at the end of the '60s, I sensed an era of environmental concern coming," he explains. "While my company's products weren't glamorous, they were significant, contributing to an awareness of environmental and air quality issues that hadn't existed before and that is hard for us to imagine not existing now."

Gas and vapor monitors are, in essence, a high-tech—not to mention humane—version of the canaries used as warning systems for early coal miners. The birds' delicate systems were vulnerable to the buildup of carbon monoxide and methane in the narrow, unventilated coal shafts, and if they died, the miners who had brought them down would know to evacuate in a hurry. Today, ENMET instruments monitor the presence of volatile gases in space craft, in hospitals, in the tunnels below Walt Disney World, and in the grand ballrooms of Canard Cruise Line "Princess" ships.

"The last of these isn't out of concern about the presence of harmful compounds," Brown notes. "It's to ensure that the atmospheric conditions out at sea will allow the dry ice to work in their big evening shows."

Though Brown has called Ann Arbor home for nearly half a century, his ties to the Seacoast area remain strong. He makes regular trips East to visit family and the UNH campus, and is looking forward to his 50th Reunion next June, an occasion he has marked by establishing an endowed scholarship, the Verne R. and Kay W. Brown Electrical and Computer Engineering Scholarship Fund.

Brown's hope is that the scholarship will make it possible for a New Hampshire resident who might not otherwise be able to attend college to enjoy some of the same successes he had at UNH, and chart a positive course for his or her future.

"I loved my UNH education," he says. "This is the place where it all began."