Wisdom from the Hoyt Lecture

Each year since 1943 the American Foundry Society has featured a “foundation lecture” delivered by an individual chosen to share their wisdom and experience at the Society’s annual assembly. These lectures, named in 1947 after Charles Edgar Hoyt, reflect the thinking and passion of the best and brightest spokesmen of the metalcasting industry. Seldom however has this repository of wisdom been examined in aggregate and seldom have any engaged in an effort to observe themes in these lectures for the benefit of a contemporary audience. The author, the Hoyt Memorial Lecturer in 2005, presents his understanding of the wisdom of the Lecture around common themes in these presentations, including the nature and importance of research, our responsibility to people engaged in foundry work, the importance of education, the nature of the relationship between foundry and government, quality and the art of management. The author includes reading suggestions from the Hoyt corpus for those interested in going further into the Lecture’s wisdom.