Distinguished Engineer
Hometown: Frederick
Electrical Engineering,
Merlyn E. Schlenker participated in Board of Control, AIEE, Sigma Tau, Blue Key and Rooter Bums while attending South Dakota State College. He began his career with Westinghouse following his graduation from SDSC. He went on to work as a power line carrier for Microwave Westinghouse, application engineer for Reliance Electric, regional manager for Imperial Electric, servo drive division manager for Sciaky Brothers and founder and president of Hyper Loop. In 1977, he founded Schlenker Enterprises which exported high performance servo drive systems and imported precision measuring devices and ground ball screws. Schlenker developed and promoted high performance stepping type systems utilizing DC motors in lieu of stepping motors. He authored several papers on servo drive systems and spoke in Paris, Leipzig, Bombay, Teipei and San Paulo on electric versus hydraulic servo drives. He provided transducer data for the first international machine tool task force conference sponsored by the U.S. Air Force and the Lawrence Livermore Lab.