Leaving South Africa in June 1991 was a leap into the unknown for my family and I. I sold my manufacturing business that designed and built electronic and electrical equipment for various monopolies such as the South Africa Railways, the Post Office and the infant Motor Industry that now exports to the rest of the world.
Our main money spinner was a range of powder coating guns and related equipment that suited the white goods industry and motor component manufacturers. Hence my understanding of what motivates an engineer (usually technical) and how they approach a technical problem and arrive at a solution that works.
The point of motivation to start APT Publications was spawned from the experience I had dealing with my own engineering design staff. The low editorial quality, lack of real content and information in the electrical trade magazines in Australia made it an obvious choice to give it a go and see if I could do a better job. With the aid of our slogan ‘Written by engineers for engineers’, we did exactly that and to this day our Mission Statement runs true.
Today we send each issue to over 12000 E-Magazine readers and 5000 hard copies to more than 60 countries around the world from Asia to the Americas. We are able to maintain our original editorial philosophy of having the bulk of our content based on articles written by competent electrical engineers. In fact, most of the articles we have published in this edition of T&D fit this parameter exactly.
Valuable Information
We are constantly given feedback by our readers telling us that they appreciate every APT magazine because the articles are unique and of great value and hence keep every one of the magazines on their files for future reference. However, my greatest pleasure and honour was the opportunity the magazines afforded me to meet and spend many hours in conversation with such great engineers as David Sweeting and E.C.‘George Fox’ and many others who kept me supplied with a constant stream of leads for features and articles and names of the right contacts to talk with to get the information to publish.
Roland “Gautier the Great”