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Microwave
Hall of Fame
Part II
Updated July 13,
2008
The field of microwave engineering
contributed a lot to the efforts of both sides (all sides?) during
World War II. Building on the work done earlier in the century,
engineers developed microwaves theories and techniques for military
and commercial applications that are still in use today. And they
didn't have computers!
Go back to the first
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.
Albert
Wallace Hull was born Connecticut in 1880. He earned a Ph.D.
in physics at Yale, then worked at General Electric's research
lab in Schenectady NY. He was a noted vacuum tube inventor.
One of his tubes used magnetic control; it was called the magnetron.
Hull's magnetron only operated at kHz frequencies, but it cranked
out 15,000 watts of power and could be used as both an amplifier
or an oscillator. By WW II, the magnetron became an important
component of many radar systems. Today, all commercial microwave
ovens use mass-produced magnetrons. Nominated by Ed Reilly,
VP, Schenectady County Historical
Society, and webmaster for the Edison
Exploratorium in Schenectady, NY, which has its own electrical
engineering Hall of Fame, thanks, Ed!"
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In
1932, Sir
Robert A. Watson-Watt came up the idea of RDF,
Radio Direction Finding. He wrote a paper (with A.F. Wilkins)
describing this new technique of Radio Detection and Ranging
giving it the code name of "radar in 1935. It was
proved that the theory would work, but with a range of only
eight miles using the state-of-the-art devices of the day.
By the autumn of 1938 radar systems were in place along the
south coast of Britain. Watson-Watt became scientific advisor
to the British Air Ministry in 1940 and in 1941 went to the
United States to set up radar systems there. He lived from
1892 to 1973.
In 1959 Watson-Watt
published his autobiography, entitled "The Pulse of
Radar". This 434 page tome is a treasure trove of
information on the development of all types of radars and
countermeasures during WWII. The 1954 story about the 62-year-old
Father of Radar getting a $12.50 speeding ticket from a Canadian
cop who doesn't know who he's giving the ticket to, much less
how his "electronic speed-meter" works is solid
gold! Watson-Watt wrote a poem about his speeding ticket experience,
of Microwaves101 keeps it here!
Last time we checked there were five used copies of The
Pulse on Amazon.
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Also at Bell Telephone Labs in the 1930s, Dr. George C. Southworth
discovered that radio waves could be transmitted efficiently through
a hollow, water-filled copper pipe. He must have been a frustrated
plumber. He and his team at Bell found that electromagnetic energy
traveling through an enclosed structure moved in distinct patterns
that we all know and love called "modes", and that the
optimum diameter for a waveguide pipe was slightly greater than
one-half wave length. They also experimented successfully with square,
rectangular and oval waveguides.
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At the same time, W. L. Barrow had been
studying antennas and reflectors of various shapes, which led
him to experiment with hollow tubes. His successful propagation
of waves through a tube 18 inches in diameter was published
in May 1936. Today, the most common shape for waveguides is
rectangular, with dimensions about one half wavelength by one
quarter wavelength at the center frequency. |
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Johannes Jauman (sometimes spelled Jaumann) was born in 1903
in Bruenn (now Brno in the Czech Republic). A citizen of Germany
From 1933 to 1945, he was professor theoretical electro-technology
in Bruenn. During World War II Jaumann was involved in work
on "black submarines" - to reduce the radar cross
section of submarine snorkels and periscopes. At the same
time countries were pouring money into radar research, his
efforts helped Germany develop radar
absorbing materials. The project's code word was "Schornsteinfeger",
which translates as "chimney sweep", a reference
to the use of carbon black in the material. The first applications
for Jauman's RAM was in the periscopes of U-boats, as well
as flag poles of surface ships. However, the larger efforts
in the U.S.A. and England to develop microwave, radar and
other technologies were more crucial in winning the war. (Danke,
Peter B!)
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Still
need a picture!
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Russian "Rootless
Cosmopolitan" Abram Fedorovich Ioffe was born in
1880. After studying in Germany at the Roentgen laboratory,
in 1918 Ioffe founded the State Institute for Roentgenology
and Radiology in St. Petersburg, one of the first research
centers of Russia. In three years, the Physico-Technical Department
of this Institute separated to become the Physico-Technical
Institute, which today is simply called the Ioffe
Institute.
Why is Ioffe in the Microwave
Hall of Fame? The Ioffe Institute made a specialty out of
studying the properties of semiconductors, way back in the
1930s, long before the transistor was invented. If you've
ever searched the world wide web for, say, the DeBye
temperature of gallium nitride, then you've probably stumbled
onto the biggest treasure trove of semiconductor info on the
planet. Thanks to Dr. Ioffe!
Ioffe ran his research
institute until 1950, and died in 1960.
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In 1937, funded by $100 by Stanford University, Sigurd
(top of photo) and Russell
Varian demonstrated the first klystron
tube, later used in American radar systems during WWII
to locate and lay waste to the Luftwaffe. In 1949 they founded
Varian Associates, one of the very first technology-based
companies in what would soon become silicon valley. The photo
was taken by famed fotog Ansel Adams, but it looks more like
a promo for a 1950's sci-fi thriller. Lifelong environmentalists,
variations of their klystron tube provide millimeter-wave
power today.
The
Varians had considerable help in their enterprise from the
start from Edward
Leonard Ginzton, who was born in 1915 in the Ukraine and
emigrated to the United States in 1929 after a war-torn childhood.
Ginzton was an early researcher on the klystron tube, was
also known for his work on megawatt sources for linear particle
accelerators, gaining 50 patents. He hit his stride managing
Varian Associates, helping define a management style that
attracted top talent, that at the time was unique but is now
the norm for high tech startups. Ginzton died in 1998. Thanks
to Daniel for making sure ELG is not forgotten here!
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Harold Alden Wheeler (1903-1996) is
remembered today in microwave circles for the equations he
developed for the characteristic impedance of microstrip (curiously,
he disliked both terms, characteristic impedance and microstrip,
and refused to use them). Wheeler had a remarkable career.
While still at college in the early 1920s he worked part-time
for the then National Bureau of Standards and developed equations
for estimation of the inductance of solenoidal coils; these
are still known today as Wheeler's equations. He is also know
for the Incremental Inductance Rule which calculates loss
due to skin depth on arbitrary transmission line geometries.
Wheeler was involved in
the development of the Neutrodyne receiver and the first receiver
with diode automatic volume control and linear detector. He
then worked on FM and television development until WW2 when
he designed IFF and radar systems.
After the war he founded
Wheeler Laboratories, Inc. The company developed systems and
antennas for missile tracking and guidance. In his later years
Wheeler served his country as an expert consultant; he was
one of some 40 members of the Defense Science Board, advising
the Government on scientific matters relating to defense.
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Harold
Alden Wheeler
Wheeler obtained 180
US patents and many foreign ones in his 40-year career
and received numerous awards and commendations. He appears
in the Microwave Hall of Fame due to the efforts of Kerry
from Down Under!
As of June 2007, he
still doesn't have a page in Wikipedia, what's up with
that?
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By the end of the thirties, secret work
was afoot in both the USA and the United Kingdom. At Bell Telephone's
Radio Research Lab in New Jersey, Philip
Smith, born in Lexington Massachusetts, developed a circular
chart form in 1939 that shows the entire universe of complex
impedances in one convenient circle. The Smith
chart is still in wide use today, and will be around long
after we're all gone. Les Besser recalls that Philip Smith submitted
an article on his development to the IRE, which was rejected.
The picture of handsome Phil is courtesy of his wife Anita,
and just might be the only picture of him you could find on
the entire worldwide web! By the way, Anita's company, Analog
Instruments of New Providence, NJ, still supplies the ubiquitous
chart in paper form to the microwave industry. |
William
Doherty worked for Western Electric's Bell Laboratories
in the development of high-power transmitters for transoceanic
broadcasting when he invented the "Doherty
Amplifier". His development of a method for greatly
improving the efficiency of RF power amplifiers makes his name
familiar in the RF industry today. Doherty was awarded the Morris
Liebmann award by the Institute of Radio Engineers in May 1937
for his idea. He was still twenty nine years young! His invention
was quickly brought to market by a devoted team of Western Electric
engineers. By 1940 Western Electric had incorporated the Doherty
concept in 35 commercial radio stations worldwide, at powers
up to 50 kilowatts. This concept has been exploited many times
by microwave designers in the last twenty years, including MMIC
representations; the 2004 IEEE Microwave Symposium lists about
10 papers with "Doherty" in the title! We are still
waiting for Bill's daughter to dig up a better picture of her
famous Dad to replace the one on the right... |
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.jpg)
1939 photo
of kystron pioneers.
Standing,
left to right are Sigurd Varian, David Webster and William
Hansen. In front are Russell Varian and John Woodyard
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John
Robert Woodyard was born in West Virginia 1904. He began
as many did in the early decades of the 20th century; he tinkered
with radio, cars and electricity. He worked as a radio operator
on cannery ships in the Alaska fishing industry. Later, he decided
to formalise his education and studied at University of Washington.
He went on to Stanford University for his Ph. D; his thesis
was on the Doherty grid-modulated amplifier with Frederick Terman.
The Terman-Woodyard amplifier (a relative of the Doherty amplifier)
was the result.
Although several others
carried the idea forward, it was John Woodyard who had the
initial idea for "slabline" used in the HP 809 slotted
line.
Up to and during WWII he
worked with the Varian brothers as a key player in development
of the klystron. After WWII his work was more in physics than
in microwaves. He was a major contributor to the Berkeley
Laboratory/Stanford Linear Accelerator. Woodyard died in 1981.
Contributed by Kerry!
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William Webster (Bill) Hansen (1909 - 1949)
Bill Hansen invented the
electromagnetic resonant cavity which is the basis of several
microwave devices (including the klystron).
He entered Stanford University
at the age of 16; Russell Varian was also at Stanford and
the two became lifelong friends.
Hansen joined the faculty
at Stanford in 1934. In the late 1930s he worked with the
Varian brothers, John Woodyard and others to develop the klystron.
Of the origins of the klystron, Russell Varian said "among
other ideas, Dr. Hansen proposed the use of a concentric line
resonator for generating high voltages. Hansen and I discussed
this possibility at considerable length and considered what
form of concentric line would have the maximum efficiency."
In 1941 Hansen and his
research group moved to the plant of the Sperry Gyroscope
Company in Garden City, N.Y., contributing to developments
on Doppler radar, aircraft blind-landing systems, electron
acceleration and nuclear magnetic resonance. During World
War II he worked in New York on defense applications of physics
and electronics, including radar. Hansen was also a scientific
consultant on the Manhattan Project during the World War II.
Bill Hansen died at age
39 from lung disease caused by beryllium from the devices
with which he worked. Also contributed by Kerry!
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Frederick Emmons Terman (1900 - 1982)
Fred Terman had an early interest in the then-novel field
of wireless; he built his own receivers and transmitters in
his teenage years and later became a well-known radio amateur.
He studied for his undergraduate degree in chemistry and master's
degree in electrical engineering at Stanford University before
finishing his Ph.D. at MIT in 1924. It was at MIT that he
learned a "business" approach to education and engineering.
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After MIT Terman joined the Stanford
faculty and taught electrical engineering. He convinced the authorities
that there was a future in radio and electronics and so began the
many years of education and research that made Stanford a world
leader in that field.
In 1932 Terman published the
seminal textbook, Radio Engineering; it became a standard reference.
In 1943 he published the Radio Engineer's Handbook which, like its
predecessor, also became a standard. From 1942 to 1945, he directed
800 staff at the Harvard University Radio Research Laboratory in
research and development of radar countermeasures. He returned to
Stanford as Dean of Engineering after WWII and never left again;
he was Provost & Vice-President on his retirement in 1965. Terman
was a great leader and many of his students went on to play key
roles in the development of Silicon Valley. Two such were Bill Hewlett
and Dave Packard; Terman was instrumental in helping them set up
the famous Palo Alto garage. Another contribution by Kerry!
At the Battle of Britain in 1940 the British were able to detect
enemy aircraft at any time of day and in any weather conditions,
proving the value of microwaves to the world. The Massachusetts
Institute of Technology (MIT) opened the
Radiation
Laboratory to research applications for radar early in the 1940s.
But back in England, the British needed help.
Two British scientists, HAH Boot and JT
Randall at the University of Birmingham had devised a valve (the
Limey word for "tube") which could generate 1000 times
the power of any other existing microwave generator at the time.
They named it the "cavity magnetron"
(see Albert Hull). The problem was that it took
them a month to create a dozen of the complex units. Watson-Watt
suggested they talk to MIT, and MIT in turn suggested that the British
meet with a small company called Raytheon,
which had been founded by an ex-MIT professor, Vannevar Bush.
According to the book The
Creative Ordeal, by Otto J. Scott, "Vannevar" rhymes
with "Beaver". Not so! We recently talked to Norman Krim,
curator of Raytheon's historic archive, and he knew Mr. Bush personally,
having been hired by Raytheon in 1935. Otto Scott was a contract
writer, an outsider to Raytheon. The correct pronunciation is "VAN-uh-var".
Happy 94rd birthday, Norm!
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In 1942, Harald T. Friis, working in Bell Labs in Holmdel
NJ, developed the theory of "noise
figure" that allows engineers to calculate the signal-to-noise
ratio at the output of a complex receiver chain, and thus
has a powerful equation named after him. Harald was born in
Naestved
Denmark, in 1893. He graduated 1916 in Electrical Engineering
from the Polytechnic Institute (founded 1829 by H.C.
Oersted, the
discoverer of electromagnetics). In 1919 he received a fellowship
which enabled him to come to the United States where he studied
radio engineering at Columbia University. In 1920, Friis joined
a
research group headed by at the Western Electric Company and
apparently got stuck in the U.S.A. He eventually became a
U.S. citizen, which later did not prevent him from being awarded
the Valdemar Poulsen Medal of the Danish Academy of Sciences.
He held 31 U.S. patents submitted over five decades of research.
In 1971 he published a book on his life titled "Seventy
Five Years in an Exciting World". This gem not only contains
some great history, but also strange glimpses of Harald's
life, such as drinking near-beer instead of milk as a child,
apprenticing as a blacksmith, being bitten by bedbugs in a
New York hotel, and naming his favorite pipe tobacco.
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Click on
photo for high-res jpg! Photo courtesy of Raytheon historical
archive.
Percy was a Marlboro Man!
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One of Raytheon's engineers, Percy
Spencer, took home one of the super-secret magnetrons,
and figured out a new manufacturing process that cut manufacturing
time to a mere fraction of what it was AND improved the power
efficiency. Within a month, Raytheon was making thousands of
magnetrons a day for the war effort. Throughout the war years,
new efficient sources were rapidly developed for transmitting
microwave radar pulses which by the end of the war had reached
peak power levels as great as several million watts. One more
story about Percy Spencer. Just after the war, Percy Spencer
was still working with magnetrons when he noticed that a chocolate
bar in his pocket melted when he walked in front of the magnetron.
After a bunch of experiments, he found that popcorn popped!
Eggs exploded! You guessed it, Percy Spencer had invented the
microwave oven. |
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Rudolf
Kompfner was born in 1909 in Austria, and originally trained
as an architect but soon turned his interests to physics and
electronics. He spent some time incarcerated in England early
in WWII. You can't be too careful about Austrian architects!
Soon he was released and drafted to help out in a secret tube
research center at the University of Birmingham. In 1942 Kompfner
invented the traveling wave tube,
although his lab notebook shows he had the field lines sketched
sketched incorrectly about the helix! He moved to the United
States after the war and worked at Bell Labs with John Pierce
on other exciting microwave stuff, earning more than 50 patents.
Kompfner died in December 1977. Contributed by James, who
works at NASA!
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Hedwig Keisler
Markey, a.k.a. glamorous Hollywood actress
Hedy Lamarr, (not to be confused with Hedley Lamarr of
Blazing Saddles fame), made a single but significant engineering
contribution to today's microwave wireless networks. At her
Austrian husband Fritz Mandl's armament company, she observed
that radio-guided torpedoes were susceptible to jamming. Leaving
der Vaterland in order to avoid personal participation in
the Holocaust, she later obtained a secret U.S. patent on
the idea of frequency hopping, shared with artist George Antheil.
Their scheme used a mechanical device similar to the guts
of a player piano to modulate the RF signal. Stonewalled by
the good-old-boys of the Pentagon, Ms. Keisler's invention
was not put to use by the military until the mid 1950s, after
the patent expired. However, her work is regarded as the basis
for all spread-spectrum techniques, including those used in
today's wireless networks. Nominated by Pete F. from MA!
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Want more? Check out the next
room in the Microwave Hall of Fame!
Want to nominate someone for
the Microwave Hall of Fame? Drop
us a line!
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