Oliver E. Buckley

In 1954, the American Institute of Electrical Engineers (AIEE) selected Oliver E. Buckley as the recipient of the Edison medal. He was cited "for his contributions to the science and art which have made possible a transatlantic telephone cable." The citation also noted his "wise leadership of a great industrial laboratory" and his "outstanding services to the government of his country". Buckley spent most of his professional career with the American Telephone and Telegraph Company (AT&T). Early in his career, he was an active participant in laboratory research on vacuum-tube amplifiers and was the inventor of an ionization manometer. In his later years, he became a research manager and served for a decade as president of the Bell Telephone Laboratories.     

History of communications - The origins of carrier multiplexing: Major George Owen Squier and AT&T

George O. Squier, the inventor of the Muzak system, was the inventor as well, in 1910, of telephone carrier multiplexing, the forerunner of microwave frequency multiplexing after World War II, and its current incarnation as optical wavelength multiplexing. Squier was a Major in the United States Army Signal Corps at the time, later becoming Major General and Chief Signal Officer. His invention was initially rejected by AT&T engineers as not being commercially viable. This view was not shared by others in the engineering community, including John Stone Stone, a distinguished independent telephone engineer. After prodding by Stone, AT&T officials began a reappraisal of the "wired wireless" system, as Squier chose to call it, and by 1914 development of a commercial system, was underway. By 1918, however, when the AT&T system went into service, AT&T was claiming that Squier's work had only been "suggestive" and that its system was based on inventions of its own engineers. We describe the sequence of events, beginning with Squier's invention, that led to the AT&T commercial rollout of carrier multiplexing. We also offer some possible reasons, based on archival documents, as to why AT&T downplayed Squier's invention.     

Bell and the telephone-the 125th anniversary

The telephone went from ideas to practical use very quickly. The leading figure in the story was a Scotsman, Alexander Graham Bell. This article briefly outlines Bell's experiments with electrically controlled tuning forks and the fortunate accident which led to the discovery that magnetoelectric currents generated by the vibration of an armature in front of an electromagnet could be utilised to transmit signals. After refining the experimental apparatus Bell was able to transmit the sound of his voice to an assistant in another room. This achievement later stood the test of Court proceedings. The patent was upheld, and this experiment is generally accepted as the beginning the electrical transmission of articulate speech     

Microelectronics: its unusual origin and personality

In the 1950s, Bell Telephone Laboratories (BTL), Murray Hill, NJ, was the dominant player in microelectronics and lent its personality to the fledgling industry. Among the Transistor Three, Bardeen was a theorist of unusual depth, Brittain was the creative experimentalist, and Shockley was the versatile scientist, engineer, and inventor. In addition to his well known device and process inventions, he contributed ion implantation and photoresist processing, two of his important innovations that are sometimes overlooked. The bipolar junction transistor (BJT) was his first and very important device invention. While his effort in the business world was notably unsuccessful, it nonetheless unintentionally launched the Silicon Valley phenomenon. At BTL in the 1950s, and subsequently through the industry, heavy reliance on the work of science-educated engineers became the norm. In the late 1950s, Bell failed to embrace the integrated circuit (IC) and persisted in its error for nearly a decade, probably a consequence of “NH” factors. As a result, it forfeited unchallenged world leadership in microelectronics. Texas Instruments and Fairchild Semiconductor launched the IC revolution, with J. Kilby and R. Noyce playing the key respective roles, We now glimpse a different kind of IC that will be fabricated in a fully automatic process     

Electrical Engineering Hall of Fame: Robert A. Millikan

In 1911, the American Institute of Electrical Engineers (AIEE) selected Robert Andrews Millikan as the recipient of the Edison Medal. He was cited "for his experimental work in electrical science". He was the first recipient to be honored primarily for his scientific contributions rather than engineering or invention. The selection committee may have been influenced by his leading role in the mobilization of science and engineering to carry out military research during World War 1. The award was quite timely, since the following year he received the Nobel Prize in Physics, becoming the first Edison Medalist to win this prestigious recognition.     

From squirts to hertz [Lonnie Johnson, inventor]

With more than 100 awarded and pending patents-for everything from hair-drying rollers to soil moisture meters-Lonnie Johnson is among a small group of African-American inventors whose work accounts for 6 percent of all US patent applications. the young Johnson was known around his neighborhood as "the professor," a child prodigy who won a statewide high school science competition for turning junkyard scraps into a remote-controlled robot nearly a meter tall that ran on compressed air. His tinkering plus whopping SAT scores won him a math scholarship to Tuskegee Institute, where he earned a bachelor's degree in mechanical engineering and a master's in nuclear engineering. During his time as a NASA engineer he invented the SuperSoaker water gun. The success of the SuperSoaker gave Johnson both the financial means and the professional clout to quit his day job and invent full-time. He set up two companies, Johnson Research and Development and Excellatron, both based in Atlanta, Ga., whose combined staffs of 30 now develop new consumer products, toys, and environmentally friendly alternative methods of power. They also invest in technology startups and do community outreach, including setting up an inner-city manufacturing plant and visiting local schools to introduce youngsters to the world of inventing     

Electrical Engineering Hall of Fame: Lee de Forest

In 1922, the Institute of Radio Engineers (IRE) selected Lee de Forest as the fifth recipient of its Medal of Honor. He was cited for "his major contributions to the communications arts and sciences, as particularly exemplified by his invention of that outstandingly significant device: the three-electrode vacuum tube, and his work in the fields of radio telephonic transmission and reception". He served a term as president of the IRE in 1930. He also received the Edison Medal of the American Institute of Electrical Engineers (AIEE) in 1946, becoming one of only seven to receive both the Medal of Honor and the Edison Medal prior to 1962. He became known for having a rather flamboyant personality and was a very prolific inventor, receiving more than 300 patents during his career. Like some other pioneers in radio and electronics, he expended considerable time and energy on litigation related to his patents.     

Who Was James Clerk Maxwell and What Was and Is His Electromagnetic Theory?

The electromagnetics community makes profuse utilization of Maxwell's equations, his theory, and their applications. It is arguable that very few of us have clear ideas about what exactly Maxwell did and what kind of scientist he was. In fact, he developed many of the fundamental ideas in electrical engineering, and provided mathematical language for their exposition. His contributions to other branches of science are no less significant. He was not only one of the great scientists of the nineteenth century, but was also great for all time. To this end, the present essay starts with a brief outline of his life. It then provides a short but critical discussion of his original contributions in electromagnetics and their evolution as his electromagnetic theory. We also give a cursory review of his significant contributions in other areas of science. It is hoped that this will provide the electromagnetics-community readers with a better and more complete appreciation of James Clerk Maxwell as a scientist, as well as of his electromagnetic theory as we know now it.     

The Nobel Prize and its discontents

The Nobel Prize is the peak honor in physics. Yet this year it celebrated not science, but technology: "the invention of an imaging semiconductor circuit-the CCD sensor." The winners were two IEEE Fellows from Bell Telephone Laboratories, Willard S. Boyle and George E. Smith. Two other IEEE Fellows and former Bell Labs colleagues, Michael F. Tompsett and Eugene I. Gordon, say the Nobel committee has made a mistake. Their complaints reveal a lot about how inventions happen and how credit for them is given. At the heart of their complaints is that the Nobel Prize winners had little to do with the charge-coupled device's use in imaging-the reason it became so important to astronomy and consumer electronics.     

Armstrong's invention of noise-suppressing FM - [history of communications]

Edwin H. Armstrong is well known as the inventor of wide-deviation or wideband FM. His patent on this invention was granted December 26, 1933, followed soon thereafter by demonstrations of his system before engineers, papers on the subject of wideband frequency modulation (FM) and its noisesuppression property, and eventually, of course, after World War II, widespread acceptance of FM by the radio industry and the public at large. The years in between were devoted to a bitter court fight between Armstrong and RCA, leading eventually to Armstrong?s tragic suicide in 1954. This is well documented in the book by Lessing devoted to Armstrong?s life [1]. What is not clear is precisely how and when Armstrong had the intuitive leap, his Eureka! moment, that led to this truly momentous invention. Armstrong was notorious for leaving very little documentation on his inventions. Lessing does note that Armstrong was fully occupied with his FM work, carrying out thousands of experiments, from 1928 to 1933, but no attempt to further narrow this interval of time down or discuss how he came to develop the wide-deviation FM concept is offered [1]. We try, in this brief note, using documentation available in the Armstrong papers housed at Columbia University, to come to grips with these questions.     

Electrical Engineering Hall of Fame: Alexander Graham Bell

Alexander Graham Bell was born 3 March 1847 in Edinburgh, Scotland. In 1914, the American Institute of Electrical Engineers (AIEE) selected Alexander Graham Bell as the sixth recipient of the Edison Medal. He was the first to receive the award because of his contributions to electrical communication rather than to electric power. His strategic telephone patents led to the organization of a large industrial corporation, the American Telephone and Telegraph Company, which enjoyed a virtual monopoly on telephony in the United States for more than a century. The telephone evolved from a scientific curiosity when it first was invented into a vital communication system affecting business management, international relations, and the everyday lives of individuals.     

Intellectual property and patent abstracts

The author explains how examiners at the US Patent and Trademark Office (PTO) treat applications for inventions that seem to violate accepted scientific principles. In order to be entitled to a patent, an invention must be useful, novel, and non-obvious. In order to obtain a patent, the inventor must submit a specification that describes the invention in sufficient detail such that one of ordinary skill in the art can make and use the invention (without having to engage in undue experimentation). Inventions that indeed violate the laws of physics are not patentable because: (1) they are not useful (i.e., they do not work); and (2) the inventor is unable to properly describe how to make and use a device that violates the laws of physics. However, it is not always so easy to separate those inventions that do indeed violate the laws of physics from those inventions that only appear to violate such laws. Examiners at the PTO use a document called the Manual of Patent Examining Procedure (MPEP) when examining an application for a patent. The author reproduces two of the more pertinent sections of the MPEP that relate to the issue of determining whether an invention is useful.     

Sultan of sound [speech technology]

This paper describes the pioneering research in the field of speech technology by James L. Flanagan, 2005 IEEE Medal of Honor awardee. Flanagan's work with speech coding heralded a series of advances over the years, including a currently favored technique, linear predictive coding. After graduating from Mississippi State as an electrical engineering major, Flanagan accepted a graduate assistantship in MIT's acoustics lab, which led to his seminal research in voice coding. Flanagan then worked at Bell Telephone Laboratories where he would spend the next 33 years. He climbed steadily up the ranks at Bell Labs, eventually becoming director of the Information Principles Research Laboratory. Among the projects that Flanagan was deeply involved in were the development of automatic speech recognition systems, voice mail, artificial larynx, and packet-switched voice technology.     

Down and out in Ham lake

This paper presents a cautionary tale to all inventors who surrender their patents in return for funding. The paper relates the experience of Corliss Orville Burandt, who claims to have invented a method called variable valve timing. Burandt discovered that Honda's intelligent VTEC engine used a technique that he believes is identical to his patent. He also claims that four other major auto companies have recently filed for patents on concepts that would infringe his patents. Unfortunately, Burandt found out that he didn't own the patents and that Investment Rarities Inc., which had initially provided funds to develop his inventions, had failed to pay the US Patent and Trademark Office in maintenance fees that were due on the 12 patents Burandt had assigned to the company in exchange for funding. This case should serve as a lesson to all inventors not to assign the patent to their development partners, but instead to give them an exclusive license. That way, the inventor maintains control over the invention, can monitor and ensure payment of maintenance fees, and can work language into the contract that stipulates that the exclusive license can be terminated if the licensee does not make a reasonable effort to commercialize the technology.     

Steeple building at Stanford: Electrical engineering, physics, and microwave research

Stanford University's microwave research program offers an interesting perspective on the interaction of electrical engineering and physics. Beginning with the invention of the klystron by William Hansen and the Varian brothers in the 1930s, Stanford's departments of physics and electrical engineering worked together closely in exploring the science and technology of microwaves. On the engineering side, this knowledge led to a series of important electronics devices for communication and defense. On the scientific side, it became the heart of the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center, one of the most expensive and productive scientific facilities of its time. What made Stanford's program so productive were physicists and electrical engineers--William Hansen, Edward Ginzton, Frederick Terman--who combined an appreciation of the scientific and technical potential of microwave research with an entrepreneurial talent for assembling the intellectual and financial resources crucial for success. They brought together electrical engineering and physics not so much by collapsing disciplinary boundaries as by opening up opportunities in the spaces between them.     

Identical graphs chart a dubious picture

For two years now, the nanoelectronics community has wondered at an amazing series of new developments flowing from Lucent Bell Laboratories (Murray Hill, NJ). A flood of papers, 17 of which appeared in the journals Nature and Science alone, reported tantalizing new results in the fast-growing area of nano- and molecular electronics. The lead author of all those papers was Jan Hendrik Schon, suddenly the object of serious suspicions regarding many of the results he published, or at least his manner of publishing them. At 31 years of age, Schon is the author or coauthor of about 200 scientific papers, often the lifetime output of a prolific scientist. Lightning struck when several newspapers, closely followed by Nature and Science, reported that scientists had discovered identical graphs in Schon's papers representing measurements on different devices and published in different journals. The management of Lucent Bell Labs responded quickly to the Schon crisis by setting up an investigative committee. They hope to report by the end of the summer whether scientific fraud has in fact been committed. About a dozen papers are identified that could pose problems, many of them reporting important results     

Electrical engineering hall of fame - George Westinghouse

In 1911, the well-known inventor-entrepreneur George Westinghouse became the third recipient of the Edison Medal awarded by the American Institute of Electrical Engineers (AIEE). He was honored for his important contributions to the "development of the alternating current system for light and power." A prolific inventor, he received approximately 400 patents during his career of almost 50 years and founded several companies, including the electrical manufacturing company which still bears his name.     

汽车雷达系统

100多年以来,无线电探测与测距(RADAR)一直是一项全球众所周知的技术,它最初基于德国工程师克里斯蒂安.候斯美尔在1904年4月第30届柏林皇家专利会上获得了发明。按照传统习惯,他将其技术创新起拉丁语名为电动镜。雷达的历史始于詹姆斯.克拉克.麦克斯韦的理论工作,随后生于德国汉堡的亨里希.赫兹通过很多试验以弄清电磁波的特性。舰艇间的避撞是这项技术的首次应用。然而,今天讨论的是汽车间的避撞应用,但这仅仅是汽车雷达系统成功应用的开始。     

Sir Charles Wheatstone?forgotten genius

Sir Charles Wheatstone did not actually invent the famous bridge circuit that perpetuates his name in technical lore and literature, but he did make many other important contributions to the technology. The present article outlines the life of this man of many talents and interests, with emphasis on his career as an inventor and scientist.