Microwave Hall of Fame
Part I

Updated January 27, 2008

Isn't about time that the word "Hall of Fame" gets applied to people that actually contributed something to society, rather than overpaid people that do nothing but sing or play ball? Here's an introduction to some of the innovators upon whose broad shoulders you stand when you work in the microwave industry, famous engineers, mathematicians and scientists that provided the foundations for the microwave industry.

If you want to nominate a Microwave God to this humble hall of fame, send info to Microwaves101.com and you will win a free pen knife if he (or perhaps she?) makes the cut. There is room for an unlimited number of inductees, so start shooting them in. No microwave managers please!

On this page, you'll find the classics--most of these guys you should know for their contributions to electrical engineering as a whole. History-makers around WWII have their own page, and modern-day geniuses now have a page to call their own. Check them all out!

Go on to the second page of the Microwave Hall of Fame.

Go on to the third page of the Microwave Hall of Fame.

Go to our main microwave history page.

Long before any study of microwaves occurred, Scotsman John Napier, born in 1550, developed the theory of logarithms, in order to eliminate the frustration of hand calculations of division, multiplication, squares, etc. We use logarithms every day in microwaves when we refer to the decibel. His "numbering rods", constructed of ivory, became known as "Napier's Bones", and comprised the world's first slide rule. Some of his neighbors suggested that he was in league with the powers of darkness... a trait that has often been associated with successful microwave engineering! The Neper, a unitless quantity for dealing with ratios, is named after John Napier.

Microwave antennas often use a Cassegrain reflector. Not much is known about Laurent Cassegrain, a Catholic Priest in Chartre, France, who in 1672 reportedly submitted a manuscript on a new type of reflecting telescope that bears his name. The key features are a secondary convex mirror suspended above the primary concave mirror, that focusses light into the eyepiece which is located in a hole in the primary mirror. The Cassegrain antenna is an an adaptation of the telescope.

Lazzaro Spallanzani, born in 1727 in Italy, had a huge influence on many of the physical sciences, which is even more remarkable because he was an ordained Jesuit priest. Here in the Microwave Hall of fame, Spallanzani is remembered because his Lettere sul volo dei pipistrelli acciecati, published in 1794, recorded correspondence about his experiments on the remarkable sense of direction of bats. Bats use sonar to move about in the dark, which some might argue was the inspiration for radar.

Alessandro Volta was born in Italy 1745. Volta was the first one to ask and answer the question, "if I stack a bunch of dissimilar metals such as zinc and silver in salt water, can I make some cool sparks if I connect it with this newfangled invention called "wire"?" This represented the development of the voltaic pile, the first wet-cell battery, which was the power source for all early experimentation in electricity. The emperor of Austria made Volta director of the philosophical faculty at the University of Padua in 1815 for this fine work. His name is presently used more than any other person in this Hall of Fame, in our estimation, because the units of electromotive force (Volts) are named in his honor. Volta died in 1827. Nominated by Arne Lüker.

Hans Christian Oersted was born in 1777 in Denmark, and was a lifelong academic specializing in the physical sciences, as well as an amateur philosopher, a follower of Kant. Oersted's discovery in 1820 that an electric current would deflect a compass needle was the first proof that electricity and magnetism are like beautiful twin sisters Mary-Kate and Ashley Olson, irresistible to engineers, and always touching each other! The unit of magnetic field strength was named the Oersted in his honor. One of Denmark's greatest thinkers, Oersted founded the Polytechnical Institute in Copenhagen in 1829, which is now known as the Technical University of Denmark.

Georg Simon Ohm was born in Erlangen, Bavaria (a region of Germany), on March 16, 1787. Ohm's experimentation with voltage and direct current led him to the fundamental relationship that they are exactly proportional in a perfect conductor. Ohm's Law (V=IR) is as basic to the study of electronics, as Newton's Law (F=mA) is to classical physics. Ohm's Law applies at DC, where he measured it, and just as well at microwave frequencies. Semiconductors have been known to bend Ohm's law, but it took more than a century for this to happen. Ohm's idiot colleagues apparently dismissed his work, causing him both poverty and humiliation. He died in 1854, but his name is still used approximately one billion times each day! Nominated by Arne Lüker.

Michael Faraday, born in 1791, is credited as the discoverer of magneto-electric induction, the law of electrochemical decomposition, the magnetization of light, and diamagnetism, among many other contributions to chemistry and physics. He did his research at the Royal Academy at London, for a stipend of 300 quid per year from the British government! Faraday's name is immortalized in the Farad, the unit of capacitance.

Christian Andreas Doppler was born in Austria in 1803. Being too much of a pencil-neck for the family stonemason business, he learned mathematics at the Vienna Polytechnic Institute. His theory of the apparent shift in frequency when source or observer was in motion relative to the other was proved using musicians on trains and train platforms listening for what notes the others were playing. He correctly predicted that the concept would prove valuable in astronomy in determining celestial motion because of color shifts. Doppler radar is used everyday, by pesky police radars for one trivial example. He died young at age 49.

At the same time Faraday was working on EM theory, Princeton Professor Joseph Henry was also playing with large electromagnets, developing one that lifted 750 lbs., partly because he was the first person to consider source and load impedance matching to maximize power transfer. In his own words, one of Henry's experiments "illustrates most strikingly the reciprocal action of the two principles of electricity and magnetism". He was also the first curator or the Smithsonian Institute, and his work on self-induction is remembered today because the unit of inductance is the Henry. Henry lived a full life, from 1797 to 1878.

In 1873, country-boy misfit James Clerk Maxwell laid the foundations of modern electromagnetic theory in his work, "A Treatise on Electricity and Magnetism" in Scotland, which he wrote as a retired college professor. Born in 1831, and nicknamed "Dafty" by his childhood peers, Maxwell theorized that, if combined, electrical and magnetic energy would be able to travel through space in a wave. If Maxwell were here today, he would be pleased to see his equations routinely solved many thousands of times per second by today's three-dimensional structural simulators using finite element analysis. Dr. James C. Rautio, founder of Sonnet Software, Inc. (one of our sponsors!), seems to have made the study of Maxwell a personal quest. He's a Distinguished Lecturer of the IEEE for 2005, and his talk entitled The Life of James Clerk Maxwell, is not to be missed, animated with at times with different voice impressions of 19th century Scotsmen (div ye ken?) You can download a copy of an excellent public-domain biography of Maxwell, written in 1882 by his friend Lewis Campbell, thanks to James Rautio, who personally scanned it into a pdf. Its tucked up under "products" on the Sonnet web site. For those of you that don't read much, it has some great contemporary pictures!

In June 1876, a U. S. patent was applied for:

"the method of, and apparatus for, transmitting vocal or other sounds telegraphically… by causing electrical undulations, similar in form to the vibrations of the air accompanying the said vocal or other sound."

Three weeks later Alexander Graham Bell's famous sentence, "Watson, I want to see you", was spoken into the first telephone. The same month, Custer's army became human pincushions.

Bell was born a Scot in 1847 and came to the "New World" by way of Canada, later settling in Boston. His portfolio of inventions is second to none, but his life's work was mainly centered on helping the deaf. The term bel (and decibel) was named by Bell Labs scientists to honor him. Bell thought the phone was too great a distraction, and refused to permit one in his study! Bell died in 1922.

Several years after Maxwell's famous treatise, German Heinrich Hertz (1857-1894) conducted experiments that proved Maxwell's theories were correct. Hertz began testing these theories by using a high-voltage spark discharge (a source rich in high-frequency harmonics) to excite a half-wave dipole antenna. A receive antenna consisted of an adjustable loop of wire with another spark gap. When both transmit and receive antennas were adjusted for the same resonant frequency, Hertz was able to demonstrate propagation of electromagnetic waves. And thanks to Philip, we now have Mr. Hertz's correct photo!

In another experiment, Hertz used a coax line to show that electromagnetic waves propagated with a finite velocity, and he discovered basic transmission line effects such as the existence of nodes in a standing wave pattern a quarter wavelength from an open circuit and a half wavelength from a short circuit. He then went on to develop cylindrical parabolic reflectors for directional antennas, as well as a number of other radio frequency (RF) and microwave devices and techniques.

Other scientists built on Hertz's work. In 1894, Guglielmo Marconi began experiments in Italy sending a signal using Morse code. He formed a company, G.E.C. Marconi, that is still around today. His early experiments proved that it was possible to send waves not just across a room, but around the world. Marconi received the Nobel prize of 1909 for his work, shared with German Ferdinand Braun.

Reginald Aubrey Fessenden, born in Canada in 1866, was a huge pioneer of wireless. He was the first inventor to demonstrate transmission of voice in December 1900 (Marconi thought that Morse Code was good enough for all communication needs), and his first transmission involved a weather report! He was the first to think in terms of continuous wave (CW) transmissions instead of the pulsed spark-gap transmitters of the day. He built some clever high speed alternators to provide up to 200 kHz, 250 kW signals for transmission, before anyone had developed a useful oscillator. He also developed the theory of heterodyne detection, and coined the word. Did we mention that he invented 500 other things too? A rare combination of genius and entrepreneur, thanks to Brian, he is now in the Microwave Hall of Fame!

Brian wishes to point out that Fessenden, Tesla, Charles Steinmetz and Ernst Alexanderson all worked for Edison. Is the top genius the one who can make business out of the genius of others? How many similar genius’s worked for Bill Gates and helped him make his billions and whom we will only hear about 100 years from now if ever?

Karl Ferdinand Braun's work on wireless telegraphy included the invention of the first semiconductor, the point-contact diode used in "crystal" radios; before that receivers had to use something called a "coheror" to convert RF to baseband. He also invented the first cathode-ray tube to provide a visual display, the precursor to radar screens, oscilloscopes and video screens alike. Today the Ferdinand-Braun-Institut fuer Hoechstfrenztechnik in Berlin carries out some great work in microwave engineering, especially in flip-chip coplanar-waveguide MMICs.

Mad scientist Oliver Heaviside's research in transmission-line theory was first applied to telegraphs, including the transatlantic cable, but microwave engineers use his concepts to this day. A mathematician, he rewrote Maxwell's messy equations into their simple, vector-calculus form. He predicted the E-layer of the ionosphere, which allows propagation of electromagnetic waves around the curvature of the earth. A trendsetter years ahead of Ed Wood, he painted his nails pink!

Leo Hendrik Baekeland was born in Ghent, Belgium on November 14, 1863 to poor parents, yet earned his doctorate at University of Ghent by the age of 21. He emmigrated to the U.S in 1889, and made his original fortune selling a process for photographic paper to George Eastman for $1,000,00 in the 1890s. Later experimentation by Baekeland resulted in discovery of the very first plastic, a thermoset compound created from formaldehyde and phenol that became known as Bakelite. Bakelite was a huge enabler for bringing radio to the masses, not just as a substrate for mounting electrical components due to its insulating property, but also as the material for mass producing cabinets. Click this link to go to the radio museum and notice the progression from hand crafted wood cabinet to molded enclosure during the 1930s. There's at least one Bakelite museum! Baekeland died in 1944, we can't help but wonder what his coffin was made of!

Although Marconi was awarded the Nobel prize in 1907 for his "wireless telegraphy" work , the U.S. Supreme Court revoked Marconi's patents since Serbian-American genius Nikola Tesla had taken out a patent for radio communications as early as 1897. Doesn't Tesla look smug in this picture? Tesla's life has taken on legendary status, having obtained more than 700 U.S. patents. Perhaps because he was jerked around by Thomas Edison early in his career, we can thank Tesla for perfecting alternating-current power distribution and fluorescent lights. No other inventor has has more articles written about him. You can find over 100 articles with "Tesla" in the title on the IEEE web site. Here's a second web site with info on Tesla that we found useful.

By 1894, Sir Oliver George was conducting experiments noting that directional radiation was obtained when he surrounded a spark oscillator with a metal tube. In 1897, Lord Rayleigh (John William Strutt) proved mathematically that waves could be propagated inside a hollow metal tube. Rayleigh also noted the infinite set of modes of the TE or TM type which were possible, and the existence of a cutoff frequency. Waveguide was essentially forgotten, however, until it was rediscovered independently in 1936 by George C. Southworth at AT&T (Bell Telephone Labs) and W.L. Barrow at MIT.

A lot was happening in microwaves around the previous turn of the century. J.A. Fleming, who had worked with Maxwell, Marconi, and Thomas Edison, invented an "electrical valve", better known today as a diode tube (and those wacky Brits still refer to tubes as valves!) Fleming also came up with an equation that expressed the impedance characteristics of high frequency transmission lines in terms of measurable effects of electromagnetic waves.

Up until this point, focus had been on sending and receiving communication signals. As the new century progressed, scientists worked with longer and longer wavelengths to achieve greater and greater distances.

In India, however, J.C. Bose was working with shorter and shorter waves. In 1895 Bose gave his first public demonstration of electromagnetic waves, using them to ring a bell remotely and to explode some gunpowder. The wavelengths he used ranged from 2.5 cm to 5 mm. Think about that. He was playing at 60 GHz over one hundred years ago! Bose's investigations included measurement of refractive index of a variety of substances. He also made dielectric lenses, oscillators, receivers, and his own "polarization device."

In 1911, only three years after building the first helium liquifier, Heike Kamerlingh-Onnes discovered that mercury loses its electrical resistance entirely when cooled below 4.2 K in a liquid helium bath. Why do we include the discoverer or superconductivity in the microwave hall of fame? Stick around, the best in microwaves is yet to come with the advent of high-temperature superconductors!

A scientist from Kcynia Poland, Jan Czochralski, was many years ahead of his time. In 1916 he developed a method for growing single crystals, which was basically forgotten until after World War II. Today the semiconductor industry depends on the Czochralski method for manufacturing billions of dollars worth of semiconductor materials. He was accused of being a Nazi sympathizer but was later acquitted and died in Poland in 1953. What a wacky world, Bill Gates is the richest man on earth and most people don't even know how to pronounce "Czochralski!"

Walter Schottky's name is embedded in solid-state physics (Schottky effect, Schottky barrier, Schottky contact, Schottky diode). Born in 1878 in Germany, he was a contemporary of Einstein and Max Planck. His work included superheterodyne receivers, noise theory, and radio tube work such as invention of the tetrode, but his most important contribution to microwaves is no doubt his investigation of metal-semiconductor rectifying junctions (published in 1938), which is the basis for the gate contact of all MESFETs. He took his dirt nap in 1976, one year ahead of Elvis.

Harry Nyquist was born in Sweden in 1889, and emigrated to the U.S when he was 18 years old. First schooling at University of North Dakota (uff-da!) and later earning a Ph.D. from Yale, he settled in to a long career at ATT and later Bell Labs. Nyquist's 1928 paper Certain topics in Telegraph Transmission Theory nails down a fundamental law of telecommunications: the highest frequency that can be accurately sampled is one half the sampling frequency (the Nyquist Frequency). His other most notable contribution to electronics is the Nyquist Stability Theorem (1932), which determines when a feedback amplifier will and won't be stable. He also contributed to noise theory, the fax machine, and television, earning 138 patents and several major awards (as if the Microwaves101 Hall of Fame wasn't enough!) Nyquist died in 1976. Thanks to Zach at LockMart!

While still in high school, Edwin Howard Armstrong erected a 125 foot radio mast at his parents' house in Yonkers, New York, to receive the weak radio signals of the day. While still in college in 1912, he invented a feedback circuit based on Lee DeForest's three-terminal audion tube that provided the first usable electrical amplifier. Think about this: before Armstrong, the only "amplifiers" that existed were the mechanical relays used to boost voltage on long telegraph lines! Armstrong won the triple crown of electrical engineering, soon inventing the superheterodyne receiver, then inventing frequency-modulation (FM) broadcasting. He cashed in on his patents, in spite of a corporate war between AT&T and RCA over who really invented the feedback amplifier, Armstrong or DeForest, but he spent more time in court than Perry Mason. On January 31, 1954 he entered the field of aerodynamics, by jumping from the 13 floor of a building. Dirtbag lawyers and corporate greed aside, the IRE (predecessor of IEEE) gave credit to Armstrong for the key inventions of radio. Nominated to the Hall of Fame by OAH of Towaco NJ! Read Empire of the Air by Tom Lewis for more info on the history of radio.

As radio applications grew more sophisticated (and popular), stations started broadcasting regular commercial programs. By 1920, the U.S. Department of Commerce stepped in and began issuing radio licenses, and in 1921 formally declared a special service category (and corresponding transmission wavelength) for commercial stations.

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Microwave Hall of Fame Part I

Microwave Hall of Fame
Part I