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Computing in Poland

2013-05-21T13:30:41Z

Administrator1:

== Mechanical Developments ==

[[Image:Jewna Jakobson.jpg|thumb|right|Jewna Jakobson's calculating machine]]

[[Image:Integraph.jpg|thumb|right|The Integraph]]

[[Image:Marian Rejewski.jpg|thumb|right|Marian Rejewski]]

[[Image:Stanislaw Ulam.jpg|thumb|right|Stanislaw Ulam]]

[[Image:XYZ, 1958 (I197902).jpg|thumb|right|The XYZ computer, 1958]]

[[Image:ZAM-2.jpg|thumb|right|The ZAM-2]]

Poland’s earliest contributions to computing can be traced back to the 18th century with mechnical calculating devices. Jewna Jakobson, a clockmaker and mechanic from Nieswiez developed the earliest of these devices, sometime before 1770. The calculator used a classical pinion wheel combination, which takes its origin in Schickard’s machine, and it could perform four arithmetic operations: addition, subtraction, multiplication and division.

Further developments in mechanical calculators came in 1817 when Abraham Izrael Stern, also a clockmaker and mechanic, developed a machine which could extract square roots. Stern's son in law, Chaim Zelig Slonimski later invented a multiplication machine in 1840, based on the Slonimski Theorem, gaining him a great deal of recognition during his lifetime. A more efficient mechanical calculator, in terms of speed and precision, capable of handling four arthematic operations and a square root was developed by Izrael Abraham Staffel in 1844.

A more complex mechanical calculating device called the Integraph capable of performing integration functions was invented in 1878 by Bruno Abdank-Abakanowicz. While the principles of the integraph were introduced by Coriolis in 1836, the first practical working model was developed by Abdank-Abakanowicz. The integraph was could graphically solve a simple differential equation and was widely used by prominent instrument makers, including the Swiss firm of Coradi in Zurich. The need to solve more complex differential equations than the Integraph could handle was one of the primary motivation factors that led Vannevar Bush to develop the Differential Analyzer at MIT in the early 1930s.

== Theory ==

The turn of the century saw a number of developments to computer theory. In 1924, Jan Lukasiewicz developed the Polish Notation, a principle of writing mathematical expressions in an operator-first manner. Polish Notation was possibly first used in computing in 1953, and was used to develop Reverse Polish Notation, which led to the development of the stack, shaping the development of programing languages such as Algol and compilers.

In 1932-33, Marian Rejewski, along with Jerzy Rózycki and Henryk Zygalski, broke the German Enigma chiper by formulating mathematical equations which described the generation of its permutations, and solving them by a very laborious computational process. The equations had the following form:

<blockquote>A = SHPNP^(-1)MLRL^(-1)M^(-1)PN^(-1)P^(-1)H^(-1)S^(-1)</blockquote>

where A means a known header permutation (which was obtained by intelligence), S – the permutation produced by the switchboard, and H, L, N, M, R – permutations from all the drums. Breaking of the Enigma cipher is considered by some to be one of the most critical scientific developments leading to the end of World War II.

Stanislaw Marcin Ulam, working with Nicholas Metropolis and John von Neumann, developed the Monte Carlo method in 1947 which is a statistical trial and error technique for solving complex problems that are otherwise intractable using analytical deterministic techniques such as generating random samples of data of known distribution to collect statistically valid results that would provide insight into the phenomenon or process being investigated. The Monte Carlo method has been applied in hundreds of problems for simulating the behavior of various physical and mathematical systems, including such diverse areas as nuclear physics, VLSI design, ecology, econometrics and many others. A later major contribution to computing theory was the development of the rough set theory, in 1981 by Zdzislaw Pawlak. The rough set theory deals with uncertainty and decision making under circumstances with insufficient information, which can be applied to areas of machine learning and data mining.

== Electronic Digital Computers ==

The first electronic digital computer to be constructed in Poland was the EMAL (Electronic Machine Automatically Computing), or the EMAL-1, based on the British EDSAC machine. Work began on the machine in 1953, and reached its most complete phase in 1955. Though it was never fully operational and dismantled before making any computations, it was a one-address computer based on a vacuum-tube logic and mercury memory, with 512 40-bit words and fixed-point, sign-plus, absolute-value arithmetic.
Following the EMAL-1 was the XYZ, constructed in 1958 by Romuald Marczynski and Leon Lukaszewicz. It was based on the architecture and instruction set of the IBM 701 computer and was a one-address machine implemented in diode logic and dynamic vacuum-tube flip-flops, with 36-bit words and sign-plus absolute-value arithmetic. It later evolved into ZAM-2 in 1960 and subsequently the ZAM-41 computer. Using the programming language SAKO, also designed by Marczynski and Lukaszewicz, the need to use machine-code was almost entirely elminated.

The first machine to be uniquely Polish in design was the BINEG, designed by Zdzislaw Pawlak 1957-1959. The BINEG used electron tubes, working with negative binary notation, with 512 36-bit words, and was used mostly for teaching purposes at the Warsaw University of Technology. The first Polish computer manufacturing company, ELWRO, was established in 1959. Their first product was the Odra 1001 machine in 1961. The Odra 1001 was based on a prototype design of first Polish transistor machine, the S1, developed at the Institute of Mathematical Machines in Warsaw. In 1961, the Computing Center of the Polish Academy of Sciences was established, and between 1962-64, ELWRO produced twenty five UMC-1 machines, which were based on the BINEG machine design.

== Further Reading ==

[http://chc60.fgcu.edu/EN/default.aspx Polish Contributions to Computing]

[[IEEE Poland Section History|IEEE Poland Section History]]

[[Category:Computers_and_information_processing]]

IEEE Puerto Rico

2013-05-18T07:43:25Z

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Early Digital Technology and the Navy

2013-05-13T14:19:56Z

Administrator1:

== Introduction ==

Steeped in long traditions, Navies tend to be very conservative organizations. And yet, there are times when these organizations will exhibit a remarkable willingness to blaze new technological trails. Two examples, one from the history of the Royal Canadian Navy (RCN) and the other from the U.S. Navy (USN), offer striking examples of this boldness. Nearly 65 years ago, both these Navies had emerged from World War II with a heightened sense that the long-established analog design paradigms would be inadequate for naval effectiveness in the postwar era. Electronic design, based on digital techniques, seemed to hold the key to unlocking a whole new generation of naval command & control systems. In the context of the late 1940s and early 1950s, the idea was extremely daring. In today’s world, where digital techniques support every facet of our material existence, it is very hard to appreciate the enormous gamble that these navies were taking. Few people, if any, on the planet had ever heard of digital electronics, and even fewer knew how it worked. The uncertainties of the gamble were compounded by these two Navies’ desire to introduce digital computation into ship weapon systems, to link all ship computers through wireless digital communications system, and to have it all respond in “real-time” to enemy threats. The end results were two groundbreaking technological achievements which presaged the age of real-time computer/communication networks: the RCN’s Digital Automated Tracking and Resolving (DATAR) system and the USN’s Naval Data System (NTDS). Both these stories share a common thread: the sea created a specific set of general needs for which bold innovation was needed. And yet, these stories also illustrate how national contexts also shaped the details of the innovation process.

== The Royal Canadian DATAR Story ==

Early in World War II, the Royal Canadian Navy (RCN) managed to win a role that was absolutely vital to the success of the Allies in Europe. After the Nazi’s had swept through the European continent, Great Britain stood alone as the last hope of democracy in Europe. As the “island fortress,” Britain seemed to stand alone facing constant aerial attacks and impending invasion. If she fell, all would be lost in Europe. Her survival depended on the constant trans-Atlantic flow of much needed supplies from Canada and the United States. The Nazis believed that if they could sever the life-line from North America, it would only be a matter of time before Britain fell. When the German surface fleet failed to command the seas around Britain, Hitler turned to the submarine, which had long been advocated by one of his Admirals, Karl Dönitz. It wasn’t long before Dönitz’s submarine “wolf packs” were taking a terrible toll on Allied shipping to Britain. By 1943, the struggle to control the shipping lanes, which came to be called the “Battle of the North Atlantic,” had become the pivotal battlefield of World War II.

[[Image:WWII-Oil-tanker-hit-by-submarine.jpg|center|thumb|650px|Oil tanker hit by German U-boat.]]

The Allies had concluded that safety lay in numbers, so supplies were moved in large convoys. These convoys moved slowly and could spread out over many miles. The notorious storms of the North Atlantic would further scatter the convoy and leave the transport vessels isolated and even more vulnerable to attack. Keeping track of where everyone was and protecting the convoy as it moved across the vast expanse of the Atlantic Ocean was a formidable task. Using highly maneuverable ships called “corvettes” and sonar (or ASDIC as the British and Canadians called it), the RCN moved through the convoy playing a deadly game of cat and mouse with the German submarines. The circumstances of WWII had thrust Canada into a more prominent role than ever before. What would Canada’s role be in the postwar era?

With the end of WWII, Canada hoped to retain an important role in the new world order, and the RCN wanted to retain its prominence within the Western military alliance that was to be called NATO. The RCN presented plans to build a full battle fleet: aircraft carriers, destroyers, battleships, etc. When political and budget realities killed this grandiose aspiration, a group of mid-level, technically trained naval officers, in the Development Section of the Electrical Engineer-in-Chief’s Directorate (EECD), suggested that the RCN use its wartime anti-submarine expertise as a way to carve out an important defense role with its British and America allies. At the same time they realized that rapid advances in submarine technology would very quickly render current methods of anti-submarine warfare obsolete. The inability to capture, extract, display, communicate and share accurate tactical information in a timely manner had severely limited the effectiveness of anti-submarine warfare. In a battle situation, the long human chain needed to convert sonar, radar and other tactical data into useful information for command-and-control was slow and often unreliable. In a highly fluid and quickly changing battle situation, where there are many ships, submarines and aircraft, this slow human-intensive chain would seriously compromise the effectiveness of anti-submarine operations. With a new generation of faster and more deadly submarines on the horizon, the inability to process and communicate tactical data in a timely manner undermined all postwar anti-submarine operations. These young naval officers reasoned that if the RCN could revolutionize anti-submarine operations by automating the production, processing and communication of tactical data, Canada would be assured of a prominent military role in the postwar North Atlantic alliance.

As early as 1947, the engineers in the Development Section had zeroed in on electronic digital computation and communications as the foundation for their automated tactical data system. The entire basis for their gamble was ENIAC, which had been worked on during the war and only became fully operational in 1946. Throughout ENIAC’s development, these Canadian officers had access to the secret and non-secret U.S. government reports related to ENIAC. They were attracted to the high-speed and high precision of ENIAC’s computation. Since no other fully operational, program controlled, electronic, digital computer was known to exist in the world at this time, the EECD’s strategy to modernize anti-submarine warfare by introducing a computer on every ship was a remarkably bold leap for the otherwise traditional culture of the RCN. But before they could proceed, the idea that data could be digitally communicated between ships had to be demonstrated. In 1949, the EECD’s ambitions came to the attention of Sebastian Ziani de Ferranti, the president of the British firm Ferranti Ltd. He was very much intrigued by the idea, since his company had just decided to commercialize the Mark I computer pioneered by Alan Turing and others at the University of Manchester. After meeting with EECD representatives, Ferranti agreed to set up a separate all-Canadian R&D team in his Canadian subsidiary, Ferranti Electric, in Toronto. The DATAR project was launched. In 1949, the DATAR team demonstrated the feasibility of digital techniques for communicating tactical data. They had used an exotic idea proposed by British engineer Alec Reeves in 1937, while he was working for IT&T in Paris, as way to transmit voice digitally. The technique was called pulse-code modulation (PCM). Nothing had come of it then, but in 1949, the DATAR team transmitted analog radar data from Toronto and displayed it as data on a screen in Ottawa, using PCM. The only other previous implementation of PCM was the top secret SIGSALY encryption equipment developed by Bell Labs in 1943.

In 1953, the prototype of the entire DATAR system underwent successful sea trials. The highest echelon of the RCN was there, as were senior officials from the U.S. Navy and the Director of the U.S. Office of Naval Research. The test consisted of two Canadian Bangor class minesweepers. The presence of submarines was simulated from an installation on shore. Each ship was equipped with an electronic digital computer. On each ship, a sophisticated display depicted aircraft, surface ships and submarines as distinctly different icons. Taking the motion of all the ships into account, the computer presented data relative to the ship’s reference frame. PCM communications ensured that all data was shared in real-time. DATAR was a distributed system in that all the ship’s computers were equal nodes in the network. By means of a new device called a trackball, invented by the DATAR team, a cursor could be moved over any target on the monitor and speed, direction, range and bearing data for the target would be displayed and refreshed in real-time.

[[Image:DATAR-Trackball.jpg|center|thumb|650px|Prototype (circa 1951) of trackball used in the 1953 sea trials of DATAR. The ball floated on air-suspension. This is probably the earliest known Trackball.]]

[[Image:DATAR-Console1.jpg|center|thumb|650px|Operator console for DATAR (1953). Screens that displayed the movement of friendly and enemy ships are on the surface of the console. ]]

Although the test was an unqualified success, it failed to win U.S. buy-in. From the very beginning, the RCN understood that Canadian requirements alone could not justify the high development costs needed to move from a prototype to full-scale naval system. For example, the DATAR prototype worked on vacuum tubes, as did all the computers in the early 1950s. Cramming thousands upon thousands of vacuum tubes, with all the ancillary power and cooling equipment, into the tight confines of a warship did not bode well in the inhospitable marine environment. The thousands upon thousands of vacuum tubes consumed a lot of energy and produced a lot of component failures. During the sea trials, sweating engineers, stripped down to the waist and armed with cartridge belts filled with vacuum tubes, ran around below deck replacing failed tubes. Everyone knew that the system would have to be miniaturized, and there were plans to use the still new idea of transistors. Canada alone could not underwrite a full-scale transistorization of DATAR. Sales to the United States were essential. But in the context of the Cold War, the U.S. Navy was not about to outsource its command & control technology to another country. Another factor in the U.S. Navy’s decision may have been its preoccupation with defending against massive air assaults, in part a result of the disaster at Pearl Harbor, which DATAR did not deal with directly. Though DATAR never came to full-scale fruition, the effort nevertheless spawned a whole series of breakthroughs in Canada’s civilian computer industry. Though the United States did not adopt the Canadian system, the U.S. Navy (USN) saw the overall design concepts of DATAR as the way to go in its own planning.

== U.S Navy NTDS Story ==

While the RCN arrived at the idea of an automated naval tactical data system from its anti-submarine experience in the North Atlantic, the USN came to it from its own WWII experience in the Pacific, and the role of radar in defending a fleet from heavy Japanese air attacks. Despite the Navy’s slow-changing traditional culture, radar won instant acceptance. Radar’s great utility for ships was evident even to the most conservative members of the USN’s senior officers and they supported any R&D that would increase the effectiveness of shipboard radar. Naval radar was capable of showing 300 aircraft stacked up from the horizon to 30,000 ft., but World War II had demonstrated the inability of humans to process the large amounts of radar data that flooded in during the heat of battle. “Every element of the information,” writes naval historian David Boslaugh, “was handled manually on radar scopes, plotting sheets, status boards, notes pads, maneuvering boards, and in men’s minds.” All calculations were done manually. Under enormous stress, the people processing the radar data were overwhelmed. They could only process a small fraction of the information presented to them. In 1945, the Chief of Naval Operations, Admiral Ernest J. King, put the situation bluntly: “The display of information was slow, complicated and incomplete, rendering it difficult for the human mind to grasp the entire situation either rapidly or correctly…Weak communications prevented information from being properly collected or disseminated either internally aboard ships or externally between ships.” The USN needed new ways to automate the processing of radar information. The appearance of fast moving jet aircraft and missiles into the naval combat scene further underscored this urgency.

In 1951, the Navy Electronics Laboratory (NEL) turned to electronic digital computers. Like their counterparts in Canada, they saw great potential in this embryonic technology. In 1951, the NEL started a research project to see if a special purpose computer system could be developed to simultaneously record, store, and display the range and bearing of a large number of aircraft in the form of electronically generated symbols. From the radar data, the system would also have to display a velocity vector for each target. Working with the Teleregister Company, the NEL concluded that the state of electronic digital technology was still too immature to handle these complex tasks reliably. The NEL then started to look at analog techniques as a way of speeding up the handling of radar data. But in the end, the analog paradigm also proved an inherently unsatisfactory solution. Ironically, little did the team working on digital radar processing know that, elsewhere in their own organization were some of the world’s best experts in digital computers. Working in great secrecy, navy code breakers had been building some of the world’s most powerful digital computers.

In 1954, Project Lamplight rekindled the USN’s hope of introducing electronic digital computers into the processing and display of radar data. Earlier that year, the Secretary of Defense had requested that the tri-service Joint Research and Development Board established a study group to review and improve the combined capabilities of the services to provide a continental air defense system for the United States. A specific item in this study group’s mandate was to see if elements of the SAGE (Semi-Automatic Ground Environment) system, an integrated aircraft tracking system still under development, could be extended to ships at sea. This study became known as Project Lamplight. The study was to be directed by the SAGE managers at MIT’s Lincoln Laboratory. However, six months into the study, members of NEL became disenchanted with the way it was going. From the Navy’s perspective, the study had not addressed radar data automation, and, even more importantly, there had been no discussion on how one could apply SAGE concepts to ships at sea. SAGE was land-based system that depended on very large centralized data processing. A centralized computer/ communications architecture was inherently dangerous in the fluid context of a battle fleet. The fleet would be blind if the ship carrying the computer was sunk.

By 1954, computer technology had advanced enough that the NEL felt that it was time again to revisit the design of computerized command & control system suited specifically to naval needs. The success of the DATAR sea trials in Canada further solidified the USN’s belief in the feasibility of an automated tactical data system based on digital computation and digital radio communication. Even though the USN did not want to buy a Canadian solution, DATAR’s overall digital computation and communications design philosophy did inspire and inform the American approach.

In 1954, Lieutenant Commander Irvin McNally, who had been the key champion within the NEL for a digital approach, put together a concept paper called the Naval Tactical Data System (NTDS). Remembering the WWII Japanese saturation air attacks, the NTDS concept paper called for a system in which each ship could simultaneously process 1,000 target tracks (later reduced to 250), show whether they were air, surface or submarine tracks, and also could show whether they were friendly, hostile or unidentified. The NTDS concept also called for the computer to assess the relative threat of each hostile target, and then assign the most appropriate response: the guns or missiles on specific ships, or airborne interceptor. Finally, there had to be real-time sharing of data between all the ships via digital radio links. Jamming all this equipment in the narrow confines of a frigate meant that it had to be designed around transistors.

[[Image:Data_Flow_.jpeg|center|frame|Diagram prepared by David Boslaugh.]]

In the context of 1954, the NTDS concept paper was calling for the most ambitious application of transistors to computers that had ever been attempted. From the outset, it was also decided that NTDS could sacrifice the increased performance of a special purpose computer in exchange for the flexibility that could be gained from a general purpose, programmable computer. The NTDS project was approved in late 1955 and work started in 1956. Univac won the contract to design and build the NTDS computers that would be put in each ship. The NTDS computer became known as AN/USQ-17.

[[Image:Computer_Area_.jpg|center|thumb|650px|Computer area of the NEL NTDS test site. U. S. Navy photo. Two of the AN/USQ-17 computers can be seen.]]

Seymour Cray was placed in charge of the AN/USQ-17’s design. He had worked on the Navy’s code breaking computer called Atlas II. While at Remington-Rand, he was put in charge of the Athena project, the ground guidance computer for the Air Force’s Titan ICBM. Athena was Remington-Rand’s first venture into transistorized computers. Later, he and other computer engineers left Remington-Rand to join the new company called the Control Data Corporation (CDC). There, Cray would become legendary for his design of supercomputers. After Control Data, Cray left to form his own company called Cray Inc., which quickly became the premier supercomputer manufacturer. The total cost of developing and testing NTDS on five ships added up to $136 million, spread over many contractors, including UNIVAC, Hughes Aircraft, Collins Radio, Hazeltine, Western Electric, and the University of Illinois. UNIVAC’s development and testing of the NTDS computer system cost $60 million. The USQ-17 computer never actually went to sea. From its testing at NEL, it was concluded that it could be improved with a new breed of transistors, and it was reworked. The resultant shipboard computers were designated CP-642 unit computers, although they embodied the architecture and instruction set of the USQ-17. NTDS went into operation in 1962.

[[Image:NTDS-CIC-mockup-training.jpg|center|thumb|650px|Naval Tactical Data System (NTDS) training in full scale mock-up of a shipboard Combat Information Center.]]

In DATAR, the Royal Canadian Navy came to automated tactical data systems because of its wartime experiences in anti-submarine warfare. The U.S. Navy came to NDTS from its wartime experience of facing massive air attacks in the Pacific. The USN had always felt anti-submarine operations and sonar data would have to be an important part of an automated tactical data system. But faced with the complexity of the air defense problem, the USN thought it wiser to wait until that was working properly before tackling anti-submarine operations. It wasn't until 1964 that the U.S. Navy decided to expand NTDS’s capabilities to anti-submarine warfare. Considerable new design work was needed to build new computational capabilities and interfaces for the expanded version of NTDS. There was considerable debate over design philosophy. By 1964, DATAR had disappeared from most people’s memories. But the Royal Canadian Navy, which still maintained a deep interest in anti-submarine warfare, was asked for its input during the design specification stage.

NTDS left a very important technological and organizational legacy in the United States. It was the first militarized, solid-state computer, and the first system to used distributed computers with high-speed interconnects. The NTDS project led to the development of the Navy’s first project management office to handle complex, large-scale electronics system development. This office pioneered management techniques by which a very small group could effectively lead large engineering projects. In the end, all of USN’s future automated fire control and command & control capabilities were heirs to the early work done to design and first deploy NTDS.

These two stories are taken from the extensive work done by historians John Vardalas and David Boslaugh. Vardalas’s work on DATAR was first published in The Computer Revolution in Canada (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2001). Boslaugh’s work on NTDS was first published in When Computers Went to Sea (Los Alamitos, CA: The IEEE Computer Society, 1999). Both authors have also added their research on these two topics to the IEEE’s Global History Network (GHN, http://www.ieeeghn.org). Although most of the material, including photos, for this article came from the GHN, it only represents a small fraction of the information contained on these topics there. Go to the GHN, log on with your IEEE web account user name and password, and then type in DATAR and NTDS into the search box for more on these stories. If you have served in, or had any association with, these aspects of the U.S. or Canadian navies, you are encouraged to go to the GHN, search for DATAR or NTDS, and contribute. David Boslaugh has single-handedly contributed a wealth of information on NTDS, and you are invited to participate as well.

{{DEFAULTSORT:Navy}}

[[Category:Computers_and_information_processing]]
[[Category:Computer_science]]
[[Category:Culture_and_society]]
[[Category:Defense_&_security]]

Inventors’ Responses to the Sinking of the RMS Titanic

2013-05-13T14:15:50Z

Administrator1: Created page with "== Inventors’ Responses to the Sinking of the RMS Titanic == The sinking on 14-15 April 1912 of the RMS Titanic on her maiden voyage after colliding with an iceberg stunned th..."

== Inventors’ Responses to the Sinking of the RMS Titanic ==

The sinking on 14-15 April 1912 of the RMS Titanic on her maiden voyage after colliding with an iceberg stunned the world. Although Titanic was by no means the first ship to be sunk by an iceberg, the appalling loss of life (more than 1500 persons died) captured the world’s attention. The relatively new technology of radio was brought to public notice—both for its role in summoning rescue ships, and also because radio messages from the rescue ship Carpathia and from Titanic’s sister ship Olympia were listened to by radio operators on shore and relayed to the newspapers. The Titanic story became one of the first major news stories to unfold via radio.

Perhaps because technology played such important roles, both positive and negative (watertight compartments which failed to save the ship, radio ice warnings and radio distress calls which went unheeded because the nearest ship’s operator had gone off duty) and radio calls which did summon assistance, albeit from the Carpathia which had farther to steam, it is not surprising that a number of inventors responded to the sinking with new technologies of their own.

Five days after Titanic’s sinking, Lewis Fry Richardson—whose researches and experiments were driven by his Quaker beliefs, and who is most famous for his work on the causes and prevention of wars—filed a provisional application for a British patent for an “Apparatus for warning ship of its approach to large objects in fog.” Three weeks later, Richardson filed a provisional application for the underwater version. Richardson’s device depended on the sending out a beam of sound from a parabolic reflector, and listening for and timing the echoes received back from any large objects—land, icebergs, or other ships. Richardson’s patents did not lead to a working device. Practical problems, such as transmitting a satisfactory sound, and the varying absorption of sound by moisture in the air (fog) made detection of obstacles by sound difficult. In fact, experiments in 1913 by ships in the newly-formed International Ice Patrol using echoes from their whistles to detect icebergs were inconclusive.

However, Canadian Radio Pioneer [[Reginald A. Fessenden|Reginald Fessenden]], who was most famous for his success in transmitting voice by wireless, was also working on a solution. Like Richardson and many others, Fessenden had been disturbed by the Titanic’s sinking. Within two months of the disaster, Fessenden was at work on applying his high-frequency oscillator—the device which produced the continuous wave which had made his earlier wireless voice transmissions possible—to solving the problems of underwater obstructions. On 29 January 1913, Fessenden applied for a patent on an electromechanical oscillator. Because Fessenden’s oscillator was capable of sending out a signal at a fixed frequency, it was much more suitable for the task.

[[Image:Fessenden-oscillator-519.jpg|frame|center]]

The Submarine Signal Company of Boston, Massachusetts, U.S.A. (acquired by Raytheon in 1947) offered Fessenden a chance to develop his apparatus. Fessenden experimented with and refined it during 1913. In 1914, a set of circumstances coalesced to provide the means (i.e. ships) that gave him an opportunity to test the device at sea.

Immediately after Titanic’s sinking, two U.S. Navy cruisers, Birmingham and Chester had been sent to the Grand Banks region of the North Atlantic for the remainder of the 1912 ice season to track icebergs and send radio warnings of their locations to ships in the region. For the 1913 ice season, they were needed in the Caribbean and so were replaced by the revenue cutters Miami (later the Tampa) and the Seneca. This new use for the Revenue Cutter Service saved the service from being disbanded. Its merger with the U.S. Life-Saving Service by act of Congress in 1915 created the U.S. Coast Guard. On 12 November 1913 the first international conference on the Safety of Life at Sea (SOLAS) convened in London. Thirteen nations signed and agree to share the expense of an international ice patrol.

14 April 1914, the two-year anniversary of Titanic’s collision, found Reginald Fessenden aboard the U.S.R.C. Miami at the southeast corner of the Grand Banks—very near where the liner had sunk.

Fessenden’s oscillator was a spectacular success. Captain J. H. Quinan of the Miami reported that Fessenden was able to detect an iceberg at distances of two and a half miles (4 kilometers). Fessenden was also able to use his oscillator to detect the depth of the ocean (confirmed by anchor chain) as 200 feet (61 meters).

Ocean travel had just become far safer, thanks to a radio pioneer who would be remembered primarily for other inventions. In 1921, Reginald Fessenden was awarded the [[IEEE Medal of Honor|Institute of Radio Engineers’ Medal of Honor]].

{{DEFAULTSORT:Titanic}}

[[Category:Communications]]
[[Category:Radio_communication]]

Titanic, Wireless Communications, and the Popular Delusions of Mass Media

2013-05-13T14:13:13Z

Administrator1:

== Titanic, Wireless Communications, and the Popular Delusions of Mass Media ==

When wireless operator [[David Sarnoff|David Sarnoff]] confirmed that Titanic had sunk and taken 1,500 people with it on 15 April 1912, the news shocked tens of millions of Americans who thought trans-oceanic travel was safe. After all, they had seen, read and heard about the power and wonders of [[Wireless Telegraphy|wireless telegraphy]] on the high seas in fiction and fact for five years. Through that era’s mass media—magazines, newspapers, theatres, movies, amusement parks and books—members of the public assumed that the ability to transmit messages electrically through the mysterious ether surrounding the earth brought with it reliable maritime communications. The sheer power of wireless telegraphy also implied a system and the regulation that we associate with systems; after all, what government would not want to assert control over such a powerful technology, in peace as well as war?

A number of people were responsible for these illusions without knowing it. First, we can credit all the inventors, engineers, scientists, reporters and editors who gave inhabitants of the first decade of the twentieth century a justifiable sense of technological optimism. As a period of revolutionary innovations, the 1900s resembled the years since 2000. In 1899, [[Guglielmo Marconi|Guglielmo Marconi]] began demonstrating and marketing his wireless telegraphy system in the United States, adding to confidence that improved electrical communications would bring world peace. The Wright Brothers flew their airplanes in private and then in public, crowning the human triumph of motor-powered transportation on land, sea and air. Henry Ford initiated assembly-line mass production of his Model T automobile, while larger and faster steamships traversed the Atlantic and other oceans. [[Marie Curie|Marie and Pierre Curie]] won the [[Nobel Prize]] for their work in the new field of radioactivity, fueling a popular fascination with the science and technology of radiation. Alan Campbell Swinton outlined the basic structure and technology of electronic television. All of these technologies drew on electricity, for which eight percent of American households were wired in 1907.

More specifically, 1906 represented an annus mirabilis for radio. That fall, [[Greenleaf W. Pickard|Greenleaf Pickard]] received a patent on his “means for receiving intelligent communication by electric waves” with a silicon point-contact detector. Two weeks later, Henry Dunwoody received a similar patent for a detector using carborundum, or silicon carbide. At the same time, [[Lee De Forest|Lee De Forest]] introduced his improvement of [[John Fleming|John Fleming’s]] thermionic diode to professional and lay audiences in the New York section of the AIEE and Scientific American, and began working on his three-electrode audion, or electron tube amplifier. These inventions inspired hundreds and then thousands of future engineers to take up the new field of [[Amateur Radio|amateur radio]] in the years that followed.

Hugo Gernsback has received considerable attention for his roles in publicizing and imagining the uses of radio and other electric technologies by radio amateurs and professionals from the 1900s to the 1940s, through his endless array of hobbyist magazines, full of breathless articles and useful advertisements. But these don’t explain how the vast majority of the American population experienced or understood the new technology and applications of wireless communications. After all, Gernsback claimed that 400,000 people were participating in wireless in some form in 1912, but that left about 92 million Americans who were not. What did they know about radio, especially in its maritime uses, and how did they know it?

The answer begins with the S.S. Hamburg of the Hamburg American Line. A flagship of the world’s leading steamship company, Hamburg regularly transported over 1,500 passengers and crew on its Atlantic route. In 1906, the company installed onboard a Marconi transmitter, enabling continuous contact with shore stations as well as ships. Not only could passengers stay in touch with landlocked friends or family, but Hamburg’s crew began publishing a newspaper at the end of October. It provided news, fiction and advertisements for European and New York products and services.

The coincidence of these technical and commercial activities ignited media offerings on wireless to a largely ignorant public. In March of the following year, the New York Times reported on Lee De Forest’s installation of a wireless telephone receiver and transmitter on the top of the Times Building and the Telharmonic Tower. The reportage was matter-of-fact if not cynical on the prospective applications, the most important of which was De Forest’s, which featured in the subtitle and the conclusion: “In the future . . . a man sitting in Bridgeport [CT] at the telephone . . . can talk to his wife as she sails for Europe, even after she is out of sight of land.”

That same month, Stella Miller Neal turned the shipboard wireless link to her own devices in the first fiction about maritime wireless. Her story in The New England Magazine, “Elopement by Wireless,” told how Phoebe North circumvented her grandfather’s plans for her marriage by using a nearby, three-year-old wireless station to marry her shipboard lover. Other writers who earned their living filling the endless demand for fiction in national magazines—the broadcast media of their day—soon capitalized on the possibilities that the latest technology offered for traditional story themes. Between July and December 1907, Edwin Balmer published in the popular Saturday Evening Post not one but three stories—over five issues—that featured wireless telegraphy in maritime situations. Balmer, a professional writer based in Chicago, was not a romantic or a science fiction writer, but he imagined contemporary applications of technologies in the first stages of commercialization (science fiction came later when he co-wrote When Worlds Collide with Philip Wylie). Nor did he worry much about the realism of wireless practice: his operators have no difficulties in sending and receiving lengthy, detailed messages in Morse code that expand on the seriousness of a situation. Balmer’s tales involved assured, wealthy, young men and educated women using radios to find and arrest a well-spoken bandit on the North Atlantic route; rescue their sinking craft in the middle of the South Pacific; and preserve the nation’s interests in Venezuela by deceiving a German fleet with the wireless traffic of an imaginary American one.

Balmer was not alone in putting wireless to work for the sake of melodrama. Two other writers composed romances on the high seas for two other leading magazines, Cosmopolitan and Munsey’s Magazine in 1907-8. Balmer’s fusion of high technology with dramatic themes, however, struck nerves and gold as his crime story, “By Wireless,” became the 10-minute movie Caught by Wireless a year later, starring D. W. Griffith; it presaged the trans-Atlantic capture of murderer Hawley Crippen in 1910. “From the Reef: What the Wireless Told” highlighted the power of a spark transmitter to relay messages to and from a sinking ship, and an electrician suggested to Balmer that he turn that part of the story into a one-act scene for vaudeville production. The pair copyrighted the sketch early in 1908, but discovered that vaudeville could not afford the electrical stagecraft necessary to replicate the transmitter.

At this point, the entrepreneur behind Luna Park on Coney Island bought in. The son of an iron works manager, Frederic Thompson was the multimedia genius of his generation. His inspiration for a career in technological fantasy came from a year at Chicago’s Columbian Exposition in 1893. Deeply impressed by the effect of overwhelming electric lighting on a population still accustomed to gas and oil lamps, Thompson went on to develop theme park exhibits at other expos, most notably Buffalo’s in 1901. There his “Trip to the Moon” saved the event from bankruptcy and quite possibly inspired Georges Méliès’s movie, inasmuch as Thompson imported the midgets inhabiting his lunar set from Paris. In New York, Thompson drew on the new subway line and plenty of Brooklyn Edison’s electricity to create Coney Island’s electrified phantasmagoria, Luna Park. Seven to ten million largely middle-class visitors descended upon the boardwalks and shows every summer from 1903 to bask in the light of 250,000 multicolored bulbs illuminating Thompson’s unique pastiche of eastern and western architectural styles. They took in shows recreating a tenement fire and “The Fall of Port Arthur,” and in the summer of 1908, a ship rescue in “Via Wireless.”

It proved highly successful, aided perhaps by the actual use of wireless to rescue travelers on a burning transport off City Island in New York Harbor in March. Thompson then commissioned two playwrights to turn it into a four-act drama that also incorporated his theatrical interests in a steel mill, large-caliber naval cannon, and a love triangle. Via Wireless opened at the 1,000-seat Liberty Theatre on 42nd Street in November; a spark transmitter in the lobby relayed presidential election results to the crowd in the lobby. Critics agreed that the plot made little sense, but they all praised the drama generated by the operator’s monologue as he spoke out the messages he tapped and received on the blue sparking transmitter on a pitching, storm-tossed ship. Almost as good, according to Electrical Review and Western Electrician, were the special effects showing the steel mill at night, in an homage to Thompson’s father.

It played 88 shows, right up to the day in January 1909 that S.S. Florida rammed R.M.S. Republic in a fog off Nantucket Island. Republic’s wireless operator, Jack Binns, contacted several stations, and the Baltic rescued 750 passengers and crew from a ship that one observer thought “unsinkable.” The modest Binns became a reluctant celebrity, celebrated by newspapers large and small across the country and feted with a tickertape parade in New York City. Music publishers offered songs about him and the safety of wireless, and Vitagraph Pictures recreated the story less than a month later as C.Q.D.; or, Saved by Wireless: a True Story of the Wreck of the Republic. By late February, models of the ships were colliding in a steamy tank so realistically that many who saw the collision on nickelodeon screens wondered how it was possible. After an embarrassing fete arranged by Thompson at the Hippodrome, the world’s largest theatre, the reluctant Binns spent most of the year touring with the Via Wireless roadshow, pushed by his employer Guglielmo Marconi, who needed more business, and pulled by Thompson, who offered far more than Binn's $12 a week salary. It played every major city in the country; President William Taft attended the play in Washington, D.C. Three years later Taft would send repeated, and unanswered, wireless messages to Carpathia to learn more about the fate of his aide de camp, Archibald Butt, on Titanic.

Saved by Wireless returned to Luna Park in 1910 without Binns, and continued on to London and the British Empire. Meanwhile, Thompson turned the play into a syndicated newspaper series for cities not big enough to attract the show. Balmer also profited, turning one of his other stories into a novel in 1911, and expanding the third into a novella for The Popular Magazine. Another writer made the first comedy out of radio romance, in the three-act play, “Won by Wireless,” in 1909, and on 15 April 1912, the Library of Congress registered the copyright for Henry MacRae’s two-reel comedy, Rescued by Wireless. It took two years to actually debut.

The commingling of real-life stories and fantasies in the minds of editors, producers, publishers, politicians and consumers reminds us that the separation of news and entertainment is rarely clean. Joined serendipitously, if not by financial interest, the participants in this conflation used radio in tales to promote and assume the safety of ships in distress, despite widely reported failures of wireless technology in other applications, and ignorance of actual practices at sea. None of this diminished the allure of the mysterious technology offering action at a distance. By confounding truth and fiction about the reality of wireless technology, however, Americans set themselves up for shock and suffering from unrealistic assumptions and expectations about working systems, safety regulations, human nature, and the prospects for happy endings.

Indeed, the sinking of Republic forced a reluctant Republican Congress to pass the Wireless Ship Act in 1910, requiring shipping interests to pay for shipboard wireless stations and contract operators. It also aligned the U.S. with the second International Wireless Telegraph Convention of 1906 by mandating that all ships respond to others’ messages; assign priority to SOS distress calls; and provide for unlicensed but “skilled” operators.

Titanic made it apparent that this regulation was insufficient for public safety. Three days after Carpathia arrived in New York City with the survivors, President Taft called on all maritime nations to organize the safety systems and procedures for ocean-going ships. The result was further international regulation and domestic legislation that summer. Since then, efforts to increase wireless reliability have resulted in more complex, satellite-based, distress-call systems that alternately exclude radio operators and assign more responsibility to ships’ captains. As Costa Concordia’s accident last January demonstrates, however, regulation and higher technology will never fully exclude the frailties of the human factor.

== Further reading ==

Corn, Joseph J., ed. Imagining Tomorrow: History, Technology, and the American Future (1986).

Douglas, Susan. Inventing American Broadcasting, 1899-1922 (1987).

Lovelace, Virginia. Jack Binns ~ Wireless Hero (www.jackbinns.org/home).

Nasaw, David. Going Out: The Rise and Fall of Public Amusements (1993).

Rasenberger, Jim. America, 1908 (2007).

Register, Woody. The Kid of Coney Island: Fred Thompson and the Rise of American Amusements (2001).

White, Thomas H., ed. United States Early Radio History, Section 5 (http://earlyradiohistory.us/sec005.htm).

[[Category:Communications]]
[[Category:Radio_communication]]

Pulse Code Modulation

2013-05-13T14:08:49Z

Administrator1: Created page with "== Pulse Code Modulation == In 1937, Alec Reeves came up with the idea of Pulse Code Modulation (PCM). At the time, few, if any, took notice of Reeve’s development. Even Reeve..."

== Pulse Code Modulation ==

In 1937, Alec Reeves came up with the idea of Pulse Code Modulation (PCM). At the time, few, if any, took notice of Reeve’s development. Even Reeves was forced to abandon his invention unable to see how it could be implemented with the technology of the day. In 1965, some 28 years later, the Franklin Institute awarded Alec Reeves the Stuart Ballantine Medal for his pioneering work on PCM. Labeling it a “major communications invention”, the Franklin institute’s press release reminded the public that PCM had made it possible for the Mariner IV spacecraft to transmit its wonderful images of Mars back to Earth. But in 1965, the true potential of PCM was still untapped. Today, on the seventy-fifth anniversary of Reeves idea, PCM has become an indispensable element in our modern communications infrastructure and a fundamental enabler of modern popular culture. For example, PCM has very dramatically transformed the way we record, distribute, and listen to music.

== Long Distance Telephony and Noise ==

Alec Reeves, like other engineers working in telephony, grappled with the problem of the additive nature of noise when a signal underwent multiple amplifications along a long distance line. The development of telephony was a remarkable advance over telegraphy but it also introduced a new challenge. How was one to transmit an analog signal over long distances? Lee De Forest’s invention of the triode vacuum tube in 1906, which he called the Audion, not only heralded the birth of electronics and the rise of the radio broadcast technology, it also provided telephony with an important tool to expand the range of long distance calls: an amplification device. But each time the telephone signal was amplified, more noise would be introduced. Because of the dot-dash encoding, telegraphy did not suffer from the same problem. A telegraph repeater could easily replicate a weak dot or dash into a fresh one without introducing any noise. In 1937, Reeve’s had concluded that the best way to overcome the noise issue in long distance telephony was to transmit a digitized version of the analog voice signal.

Alec Reeves was born on 10 March 1902, in Redhill, Surrey, U.K. Reeves’s father, Edward Ayearst Reeves, had a distinguished career as a geographer. He was noted author on cartography and the Royal Geographical Society’s Surveyor. In 1918, Alec Reeves went to Imperial College, London, to study engineering. After graduating in 1921, he did postgraduate study at Imperial College. In 1923, Reeves joined the London Laboratory of International Western Electric, a leading manufacturer of radio and telecommunications equipment. In 1925, after his firm had been taken over by International Telephone and Telegraph (IT&T), Reeves went to work at IT&T's laboratory in Paris. It was there that Reeves came up, in 1937, with the idea of using a binary representation of sound to overcome the noise issue in long distance analog telephone transmissions. It a sense it was a return to the robustness of telegraphy.

Nearly seventeen years earlier, in 1921, Paul M. Rainey, from Western Electric, had filed a patent for a machine that would send faxes via telegraphy using a PCM-like technique to encode the optical scans of the pages.” An object of this invention,” claimed Rainey in his patent, “is to provide means whereby facsimile pictures, drawings or the like may be transmitted by means of code combinations or permutations of electrical impulses.” It took five years for the patent to be granted. Perhaps the patent office had difficulty wrapping its mind around the idea. Little is known as to whether Western Electric took the idea seriously and tried to produce a working prototype. Reeve’s knew nothing of Rainey’s PCM technique, which used an opto-mechanical implementation. Besides, Reeves was interested in an entirely different problem: noise in long distance telephony, using purely electronic digital techniques.

[[Image:Pcm1.png|center|frame|The First Disclosure of PCM: Paul M. Rainey, "Facsimile Telegraph System," U.S. Patent 1,608,527. Filed 20 July 1921.Issued 30 November 1926.]]

In 1938, after obtaining a French patent for his idea, he filed for a U.S. patent in 1939, which was then granted in 1942. His patent’s characterless title, “Electric Signaling System,” stood in sharp contrast to the great import of the patent’s contents. Many years later, Reeves recalled that, from the beginning, he “realized that it could be the most powerful tool so far against the effects of interference on speech — especially on long routes with many regenerative repeaters, since these devices could easily be designed and spaced so as to make the noise nearly noncumulative.” And yet Reeves walked away from this work. He realized that the PCM was an idea ahead of its time. The state of electronics at the outbreak of WW II was not up to the task of making PCM a viable commercial solution for telephony. Time would be needed for digital electronic hardware to catch up to the demands required by PCM. Finally, with the outbreak of war, Reeves’s focus shifted to the war effort and radar. He became be the Chief Scientist at Britain’s the Air Ministry Research Establishment, which had been founded by Watson Watt. During this time he also invented “Oboe” a system to for accurate bombing through overcast skies. “Oboe” was used in the large bombing raids over Germany and in the Pacific. Paradoxically, a wartime imperative brought a new impetus to the development of PCM, but this time from a very different need, one that had little to do with long distance telephony and noise.

== Making Telephone Calls Secret: Bell Labs and SIGSALY ==

At the start of WW II, the only available technology for secure voice communication was the A-3 Scrambler system. U.S. military authorities did not know that the Germans had broken the A-3 Scrambler. Nevertheless top military officers like General George Marshal did not trust A-3 to securely transmit the most sensitive of information. Very early on in the war, the U.S. Army asked Bell Labs to come up with a new way of securing voice communications. It soon became apparent that digitizing the analog voice signal would allow one to apply cyphering techniques to the message. With cross-licensing agreements with IT&T, the Bell Labs people turned to Reeves work on PCM. The resulting speech enciphering system, called SYGSALY, became the first working example of PCM technology. Under the cloak of secrecy, Bell Labs made great strides in advancing the state-of-the-art in PCM techniques. By the war's end, several groups at Bell Labs had worked on PCM.

[[Image:Pcm2.png|center|frame|SIGSALY terminal (1943)]]

During the 1947-48 period, in numerous articles, the Bell Labs work on PCM finally became public. H.S. Black and J.O. Edson, who had been key people in Bell’s speech encryption efforts, published their account in the AIEE Transactions. They announced to the world that a “radically new modulation technique for multichannel telephony has been developed which involves the conversion of speech into coded pulses.” They also recognized the importance of Reeves patent. They concluded this important paper with “PCM appears to have exceptional possibilities from the standpoint of freedom from interference especially when applied to systems having many repeaters in tandem, but its full significance in connection with future radio and wire transmission may take some time to reveal.” It is interesting that Black and Edson chose an AIEE and not IRE journal in which to reveal this work to the world. In 1957, Black went on to win AIEE’s Lamme Medal. In 1948, which, in part, was due to his work in PCM. In 1948, Oliver, Pierce and Shannon published their landmark “The Philosophy of PCM” in the Proceedings of the IRE. Their paper, a rigorous analysis of PCM, confirmed the merits of Reeves original conception.

<blockquote>“PCM offers a greater improvement in signal-to-noise than other systems. By using binary (on-off) PCM, a high-quality signal can be obtained under conditions of noise and interference so bad that it is just possible to recognize the presence of each pulse. Further, by using regenerative repeaters which detect the presence or absence of pulses and then emit reshaped, respaced pulses, the initial signal-to-noise ratio can be maintained through a long chain of repeaters.”</blockquote>

Although they saw equipment for PCM as more complex than other forms of modulation, Oliver, Pierce, and Shannon concluded that “in all, PCM seems ideally suited for multiplex message circuits, where a standard quality and high reliability are required.”

What is striking about these papers, and all the others published by the Bells Labs group during the late 1940s, is the absence of any reference to speech encryption, which had been the driving force for Bell’s entry into PCM. The transition to civilian applications appears to have been seamless. When it came to it R&D investment in PCM, Bell Labs never took its eye off the company’s central mission, the telephone communications business. Although PCM for civilian uses had gotten off to a good start, progress remained slow.

Reeves observed that PCM had been a child with a long infancy, and that, even in 1965, this technology was still in the adolescent stage. Adequate miniaturization was still holding back its development. But two decades after the invention of the transistor at Bell Labs, semiconductor technology was finally diffusing rapidly through the economy. This accelerated progress was finally providing the hardware needed to make PCM economically viable for the wider civilian market. Reeves believed that PCM was going to be essential enabler for the information society that was appearing on the horizon. ARPANET, timesharing services, and the rise of cable television pointed to a demand for technology that could move large volumes of information across national and international networks. In 1965, Reeves argued that, by the year 2000, transmitting “moving pictures” would also be an essential part of data networks. He also felt that the pressures on the transportation infrastructure would further increase the importance of PCM. In the year 2000 “commuters will refuse to accept the delays and inconveniences that even a moderate journey to and from their place of work would entail. We shall have to transport the brains, the skills of the staff, not their bodies, to their daily jobs, again involving not merely ordinary data !inks but a great many private television channels as well.” Reeves concluded his crystal ball gazing by suggesting that PCM would form the very backbone of the communications systems. He was on the mark with this prediction, but his suggestion of a revolution in commuting patterns may need a few more decades before it comes to pass.

Although PCM had advanced considerably during Reeves’s life time, he never lived to see it outgrow adolescence. Reeves died in 1971.

[[Image:Pcm3.png|center|frame|In 1969, the U.K. issued a 1 shilling stamp to commemorate PCM.]]

== Additional Readings and References ==

Alec Reeves, “Electric Signaling System”, U.S. Patent 2,272,070, 3 February 1942.

H.S. Black and J.O. Edson, “Pulse Code Modulation”, AIEE Transactions, Vol. 66 (1947), 895-9

B.M. Oliver, J.R Pierce, and C.E. Shannon, “The Philosophy of PCM”, Proceedings of the I.R.E., November 1948, 1324 – 31.

Alec H. Reeves, “The Past, Present, and Future of PCM”, IEEE Spectrum, May 1965, 58-63.

F. Maurice Deloraine, “The 25th Anniversary of pulse code modulation: Historical Background”, IEEE Spectrum, May 1965, 56-57.

For a Alec Reeves’s professional CV go to http://www.quantium.plus.com/ahr/

James E. Brittain, “Electrical Engineering Hall of Fame: Harold S. Black”, Proceedings of the IEEE, Vol. 99, No. 2 (Feb. 2011), 351-3.

[[Category:Communications]]
[[Category:Communication_methods]]
[[Category:Information_theory]]

The Foundations of Mobile and Cellular Telephony

2013-05-13T13:57:24Z

Administrator1:

== The Foundations of Mobile and Cellular Telephony ==

On 17 June 1946, a driver in St. Louis pulled out a handset from under his car’s dashboard, placed a phone call and made history. It was the first mobile telephone call, placed on a system inaugurated by Southwestern Bell, one of AT&T’s local operating companies.

A team including Alton Dickieson and D. Mitchell from AT&T’s research unit, Bell Labs, and H. I. Romnes from AT&T’s manufacturing subsidiary, Western Electric, had worked more than a decade to achieve this feat. By 1948, wireless telephone service was available in almost one hundred cities and highway corridors. Customers included utilities, truck fleet operators and reporters. But with only 5,000 customers making 30,000 weekly calls, it was far from commonplace.

This wireless network could handle only a small volume of calls. A single transmitter on a central tower provided a handful of channels for an entire metropolitan area. Between one and eight receiver towers handled the call return signals. At most, three subscribers could make calls at one time in any city using the single transmitter and the tiny amount of spectrum allocated by the Federal Communications Commission to this service. It was in effect a massive party line, where a tightly controlled number of subscribers had to listen first for someone else on the line, and, if finding the line free, signal an operator, who would place the call. During the call, the user depressed a button on the handset to talk and released it to listen. The equipment, of course employing vacuum tubes, weighed eighty pounds, filled much of a vehicle’s trunk and drew so much power that it would cause the headlights to dim. Service cost $15 per month, plus thirty to forty cents per local call, equivalent to $175 2012 dollars, plus $3.50 to $4.65 per call.

[[Image:Mobile-pic1.png|center|frame|A Southwestern Bell foreman testing mobile telephone service, St. Louis, 1946 (Courtesy AT&T Archives and History Center.)]]

In 1965 an improved system, known as IMPS (for Improved Mobile Telephone Service), combined with a small increase in available spectrum, brought a few more channels and customer dialing, and eliminated the push-to-talk button in favor of full duplex capabilities. But capacity remained limited to the point that Bell System officials rationed the service to 40,000 subscribers, selected according to agreements with state regulatory agencies. For example, 2,000 subscribers in New York City shared just twelve channels, and typically waited thirty minutes to place a call. There was a long waiting list for would-be subscribers attesting to the demand for the service; a demand that could likely only be met by better technology.

[[Image:Joel S. Engel.jpg|thumb|right|Joel Engel]]

[[Image:Richard H. Frenkiel.jpg|thumb|right|Richard Frenkiel. For their pioneering fundamental work on cellular telephony, Joel Engel and Richard Frenkiel, along with Bell Labs coworker Bill Jakes, shared the IEEE Alexander Graham Bell Medal in 1987. Engel and Frenkiel were further honored with the National Medal of Technology in 1994, by which date the importance of cellular telephony was certainly apparent to all.]]

Something better — cellular telephone service — had been conceived in 1947 by Donald H. Ring at Bell Labs, but the idea could not be put into practice. His concept included multiple low power transmitters and receivers spread throughout a region or highway in series of cells, with different frequencies used in adjacent cells but reused within a city (or along a highway), and a way to switch the calls to adjacent cells as a vehicle moved down the road. The technology to implement such a scheme did not yet exist and the spectrum needed was not available. AT&T had applied to the FCC for more spectrum as early as 1946 and again in 1958, but none was forthcoming until 1968, when the FCC asked AT&T for a proposal for using a significant swath of spectrum that had been allocated to UHF TV channels 70-83, but was underused. A team of young research engineers at Bell Labs, including future IEEE fellows [[Joel S. Engel|Joel Engel]] and [[Richard H. Frenkiel|Richard Frenkiel]], had begun working on advanced mobile telephony two years earlier, rediscovering Ring’s concept, and developing it as a network of hexagonal cells. With the availability of solid-state electronics and computers they were able to propose a working system. Bell Labs switching expert (and IEEE Fellow) Amos Joel contributed another other crucial piece — a system to automatically switch the call from one cell to another. In 1971 AT&T submitted its report to the FCC for an analog cellular telephone system to be operated by AT&T on spectrum to be allocated by the FCC.

AT&T considered the system as a better way to provide telephone service to moving vehicles. Since all the vehicle equipment for the existing system was made for AT&T by Motorola, AT&T shared its work on the new system with the other company. Motorola, however, had another larger and more profitable business providing point-to-point private vehicle systems for Radio Common Carrier (RCC) uses like taxi dispatching. Motorola was afraid that a cellular system under AT&T control would mean the end of this business. So, Motorola did two things — it convinced their RCC customers to work with Motorola to argue before the FCC that the new spectrum and technology should not be the exclusive province of the telephone company, and it put a team to work on developing a hand-held cell phone, under the direction of company Vice President Marty Cooper. Cooper’s team succeeded, demonstrating a working prototype in April 1973. It weighed 45 ounces (1.28 kg) and its rechargeable battery was good for only around 30 minutes of calling, but it worked. His first call, made from a New York City street minutes before the scheduled public demonstration, went to his counterpart Engel at Bell Labs. The demonstration got the media’s and, more importantly, the FCC’s attention. Nonetheless, the FCC took eight years to decide what to do. While the FCC commissioners were deliberating, they authorized AT&T to demonstrate a working prototype commercial system in Chicago in 1978 and Motorola a system in Washington the following year.

Finally, in October 1981, the FCC announced that it would allocate two swaths of frequencies in the 800MHz range to cellular telephony, and would award two licenses in each market — one reserved for an incumbent wireline (i.e. telephone) company, and one for a non-wireline competitor. AT&T and its subsidiary Illinois Bell opened the first modern cellular system in Chicago in October 1983. A Motorola-designed system opened in Washington and Baltimore soon thereafter.The phones were expensive — a car phone cost $2500 and a portable phone $4000, not including airtime. With the breakup of the Bell System on 1 January 1984, all of the Bell System licenses passed to the newly divested regional telephone companies.

[[Image:Mobile-pic2.png|center|frame|Dave Meilhan, the first cellular telephone customer in Chicago, makes a call from his car phone, 1983. (Courtesy AT&T Archives and History Center.)]]

Cell phone service availability quickly spread throughout the country as the FCC awarded more and more local licenses in what proved to be an increasingly complicated process. Cell phone sales and subscriptions far exceeded all expectations; apparently almost no one anticipated that mobile telephony would become more than a niche service. One well known, but not unique study, done by the consulting firm McKinsey and Company for AT&T in 1983, predicted that there would be 900,000 subscribers in the U.S. by 2000; that number was reached in 1987. (The actual total in 2000 was 109,000,000.) With this rapid growth, the available spectrum quickly became crowded. This led to pressure for the FCC to authorize additional spectrum (a pressure that has never ended), which it did. It also led to research by several companies into more efficient spectrum use. This resulted in two distinct digital transmission systems, TDMA, introduced in 1989 and CDMA, introduced in 1995.

{{DEFAULTSORT:Cellular}}

[[Category:Communications]]
[[Category:Telephony]]
[[Category:Cellular_telephone_systems]]

Westinghouse Electric Corporation

2013-05-13T13:49:51Z

Administrator1:

== Westinghouse Electric Corporation ==

[[Image:George_Westinghouse.jpg|thumb|right|George Westinghouse]]

Westinghouse Electric Corporation was one of the driving forces behind electrical engineering progress throughout the late 19th and 20th centuries. From its landmark triumph over Edison in the War of Currents, to its expansion into appliances radio and television receivers and broadcasting, nuclear power, transportation and finance, Westinghouse was a giant in the electric industry.

Company founder [[George Westinghouse|George Westinghouse Jr.]] was born on October 6th, 1846 in Central Bridge, NY to George and Emeline Westinghouse who owned a machine shop. At the age of 15, Westinghouse enrolled in the New York National Guard at the outbreak of the Civil War, and served with the New York Cavalry in 1863. After the war, he enrolled in Union College, where he dropped out after a couple of months.

Much like his father, Westinghouse had an affinity for machinery, which he applied to invention. He invented a rotary steam engine during his brief stint at Union, and after dropping out he worked at his father’s machine shop. As a machinist, Westinghouse worked largely on railroad parts. In 1867 he invented a car replacer, used in guiding derailed cars onto the tracks, and a reversible frog, which aids in the switching of tracks. His first major success was in 1868 with a railroad braking system based on compressed air. After being awarded a patent in 1872, he formed the Westinghouse Air Brake Company to manufacture the brakes, which were universally adopted by the railroad industry.

Westinghouse’s success led him to found the Union Switch and Signal Company in 1881. His interest in railroads spread to the distribution of gas, and later power distribution. Edison’s DC [[Milestones:Pearl Street Station|Pearl Street Station]] opened in 1882, and Westinghouse thought that due to the need for large currents over long distances and the potential for numerous power outages, direct current (DC) transmission was too inefficient to be scaled to a large size. [[Nikola Tesla|Nikola Tesla]] had a public falling out with Edison in 1886, and was contracted by Westinghouse who obtained the rights for many of his patents. Tesla had developed an alternating current (AC) system for distribution which allows voltage to be stepped up and down by transformers. Practical transformers were manufactured by Lucien Gaulard as early as 1881. With [[William Stanley|William Stanley]] and [[Franklin Pope|Franklin Pope]], George Westinghouse reformed Gaulard’s transformer design, and in 1886 they installed [[Milestones:Alternating Current Electrification, 1886|the first AC power system in Great Barrington, MA]].

In 1886 the Westinghouse Electric & Manufacturing Company was formed, which was renamed the Westinghouse Electric Corporation in 1889. While Edison claimed that AC was too dangerous to be implemented for commercial use and would kill humans instantly, Westinghouse’s AC distribution methods ultimately prevailed. The [[Milestones:Ames Hydroelectric Generating Plant, 1891|Ames Hydroelectric Generating Plant]] in 1890 was the first commercial system to generate AC current, and the [[Milestones:Adams Hydroelectric Generating Plant, 1895|Niagara Falls Adams Power Plant]] built in 1895 sent power 20 miles away to Buffalo. By this time, General Electric began producing AC equipment, signaling Westinghouse’s victory in the War of Currents.

Westinghouse boasted 50,000 employees by 1900, and established a formal research and development department in 1906. While the company was expanding, it would experience internal financial difficulties. During the Panic of 1907, the Board of Directors forced George Westinghouse to take a six month leave of absence. Westinghouse officially retired in 1909 and died several years later in 1914.

[[Image:Westinghouse_Radio_Station_KDKA.jpg|thumb|right|KDKA Radio Station, Pittsburgh]]

Under new leadership, Westinghouse Electric diversified its business activities in electrical technology. It acquired the Copeman Electric Stove Company in 1914 and Pittsburg High Voltage Insulator Company in 1921. Westinghouse also moved into radio broadcasting by establishing Pittsburgh’s [[Milestones:Westinghouse Radio Station KDKA, 1920|KDKA, the first commercial radio station]], and Boston’s WBZ in 1921. Westinghouse expanded into the elevator business, establishing the Westinghouse Elevator Company in 1928. Throughout the decade, diversification engendered considerable growth; sales went from $43 million in 1914 to $216 million in 1929.

[[Image:Westinghouse atom smasher.jpg|thumb|right|Westinghouse Atom Smasher]]

Much like the rest of the nation’s businesses, Westinghouse’s profits throughout the 1920s came to an end with the stock market crash and the Great Depression. The company operated at a loss until 1935, when it declared a profit of $11 million. Even in financially difficult times Westinghouse continued to expand into new areas of electrical technology. The [[Milestones:Westinghouse Atom Smasher, 1937|Westinghouse Atom Smasher]], constructed in 1937, was the first large-scale program in nuclear physics. Towards the outbreak of World War II, Westinghouse had completely recovered from the depression and was experiencing record profits. 1940 was the company’s most successful year to date, and sales would rapidly increase during the war, increasing from $239 million in 1940 to $835 million in 1944. The company reached one billion dollars in sales in 1950.

Westinghouse continued to invest in nuclear power, and constructed the first civilian nuclear power plant at Shippingport, Pennsylvania in 1957. As appliances sales decreased in the early 1970s, Westinghouse sold its major appliances to White Consolidated, and invested much of its capital into nuclear power. In 1975, the prices for uranium skyrocketed, reaching $40 per pound, an eightfold increase. Reneging on its agreements to supply fuel to their utility customers, Westinghouse was sued by 27 utility companies and faced potential liabilities of more than two billion dollars. A settlement was reached in 1979, where Westinghouse would supply utilities with discounted parts, engineering and other services. However, just after the lawsuit was settled, the Three Mile Island accident occurred, greatly decreasing orders for nuclear power plants.

With the decline in Westinghouse’s nuclear energy business, the corporation looked to expand into other areas during the 1980s. The cable company Teleprompter was purchased in 1980 for $646 million, effectively doubling the size of Westinghouse’s broadcasting operations. Teleprompter was renamed Group W Cable, and this acquisition was not without its problems. Notorious for poor picture quality and unreliable transmission, Westinghouse invested more than $800 million into improving the transmission and picture quality of Group W Cable. The investment proved short lived, as the cable operation would be sold for $2 billion in 1987.

While profits rose during the first half of the 1980s, many of Westinghouse’s divisions, including the elevator business, were sold off and the workforce cut by over 23,000 employees. The Westinghouse Credit Corporation brought in much of the corporation’s capital during the 1980s. Westinghouse Credit Corporation would take loans that many other banks and loan companies would refuse, charging high fees and interest. The parent Westinghouse Corporation signed a support agreement stating that they would be responsible for repaying any debts incurred by the Westinghouse Credit Corporation. Shortly after this in 1990, Westinghouse experienced a financial catastrophe and was forced to repay over one billion dollars in bad loans, marking their worst year since the Three Mile Island accident in 1979.

In attempt to revitalize the corporation, CEO Michael Jordan brought in numerous consultants who recommended layoffs that greatly decreased morale. Recognizing the potential in broadcasting, Westinghouse made further acquisitions in that area and purchased CBS in 1995. Shortly after, Westinghouse purchased Infinity broadcasting, TNN, CMT, American Radio Systems, and rights to NFL broadcasting. These investments cost the company over fifteen billion dollars. To recoup its costs, Westinghouse sold many other operations. Siemens purchased non-nuclear power generation, while other firms bought the defense electronics, Knoll Office Furniture, Thermoking, and residential security. With little remaining of the company aside from its broadcasting, Westinghouse renamed itself CBS Corporation in 1997.

Though this historic company ceased to exist in its original form in 1997, the name still lives on. The CBS Corporation created the Westinghouse Licensing Corporation subsidiary in 1998 to manage its historic brand. That year CBS Corporation also sold off its nuclear power generation to British Nuclear Fuels Limited, which in turn sold the business in Toshiba in 2006. The company is now operated under Toshiba as Westinghouse Electric Company LLC, headquartered in Cranberry Township, PA, and 126 years later carries on George Westinghouse’s legacy.

[[Category:People_and_organizations]]
[[Category:Corporations]]

UNIVAC and the 1952 Presidential Election

2013-05-13T13:47:05Z

Administrator1: Created page with "== UNIVAC and the 1952 Presidential Election == The story has been told and retold for decades: how CBS Television News used a UNIVAC computer to predict the 1952 U.S. President..."

== UNIVAC and the 1952 Presidential Election ==

The story has been told and retold for decades: how CBS Television News used a UNIVAC computer to predict the 1952 U.S. Presidential election returns and — when the computer accurately predicted the Eisenhower landslide at around 8:30 in the election night broadcast — the prediction was doubted, and only hours later did CBS reveal that the prediction had been accurate. It has become a classic cautionary tale of the dangers of allowing human preconception to interfere with logic and evaluation of facts.

There is more to the story. The exact timeline of when UNIVAC's initial prediction was made is not certain, but what is important is that UNIVAC's correct prediction of a landslide victory was ostensibly ignored until much later in the broadcast because of journalistic prudence and lack of confidence in the accuracy of the results.

Dr. Ira Chinoy, [http://drum.lib.umd.edu/bitstream/1903/10504/1/Chinoy_umd_0117E_11395.pdf whose doctoral thesis] examines the use of computers in broadcast journalism, estimates that the celebrated initial prediction of the Eisenhower landslide was made closer to 9:15. At 8:30, only slightly more than one million votes had been tallied; it took until at least 9:15 pm for three million votes to be transmitted from CBS to the Remington Rand factory in Philadelphia. CBS was receiving vote tallies from the wire services and teletyping them to Remington Rand’s factory in Philadelphia. Additional time was needed to input the data and to run the programs.

The 8:30 CBS segment merely gave the television audience a visual tour and introduction to UNIVAC; the second UNIVAC segment of the evening at 9:30 asked for a prediction, but the machine was not yet ready. By that point in the television coverage, the human commentators were already commenting on the surprising Eisenhower strength in the early returns. On the basis of pre-election polls, the race between Eisenhower and Stevenson had seemed to be close (Eisenhower held a slight edge), so the use of a state-of-the-art computer to predict what was expected to be a very close election had generated a lot of popular interest.

At some point relatively early in the evening, UNIVAC predicted an Eisenhower landslide victory. However, the UNIVAC programmers decided that the prediction was too risky to release because it contradicted what the pollsters had been saying previous to the election about a tight race.

At 10:30, which was the third on-air UNIVAC segment, the computer predicted twenty-eight states for Eisenhower and twenty for Stevenson. This was a softer prediction, and was in line with what the CBS commentators had already been telling their television audience. It was the initial correct prediction of an overwhelming Eisenhower win that the UNIVAC programmers decided not to release because it contradicted the poll numbers.

The 11:30 UNIVAC on-air prediction caused more drama. It reversed its earlier prediction, calling 24 states each for Eisenhower and Stevenson, and a slim 270 to 261 Electoral College vote margin for Eisenhower. But by 11:45, the prediction had been corrected and UNIVAC predicted 100 to 1 odds of an Eisenhower victory.

UNIVAC made its predictions based on the difference between vote tallies and the expected vote in cities and counties, based on a statistical model extrapolated from past elections. By applying this deviation in places that had already voted to those which had not yet voted, an estimate of the present election could be obtained based on past tallies in those places. One of the ironies of the election of 1952 was that the returns from Massachusetts, one of the crucial early-reporting states, were incorrectly reported to UNIVAC. That UNIVAC was nonetheless able to make accurate predictions.

The UNIVAC used by CBS was the fifth UNIVAC machine made. In the autumn of 1952, UNIVAC-5 was still in the Philadelphia factory of Remington Rand waiting for its future installation at the Lawrence Livermore Laboratories. Because UNIVAC itself was too large to be moved conveniently, a dummy control console was set up in the CBS studio in Grand Central Terminal, New York City for visual effect, its lights blinking evocatively thanks to delay switches ordinarily used for making Christmas tree lights flash on and off.

There was some irony that a machine which debuted in the public spotlight of national TV would go on to do classified weapons work. UNIVAC contained mercury delay lines, which allowed it to store 1,000 words (45 bits each) as electric pulses in tubes of mercury. Up to one million characters could be stored and accessed on magnetic tape. It was these tapes, replacing punched cards, which made the UNIVAC revolutionary, and which gave it a tremendous speed advantage because it could access its own data instead of needing to wait for cards to be loaded. It could perform four hundred and sixty-five multiplications per second and had a clock speed of 2.25MHz.

== Video ==

A brief video of the CBS prediction can be seen here.

<youtube>v7K8MW8wQWs</youtube>

[[Category:Computers_and_information_processing]]
[[Category:Computer_science]]

Bing Crosby and Magnetic Recording

2013-05-13T13:39:20Z

Administrator1:

== Bing Crosby and Magnetic Recording ==

2013 marked the 110th anniversary of Bing Crosby's birth. His career as a singer, entertainer, and actor spanned six decades. During those years, he had become a cultural institution for several generations of Americans. His velvet-like voice and relaxed manner transformed popular singing. He was one of the first performers to exploit the microphone in performance. During World War II, Bing Crosby threw himself into lifting the morale of U.S. soldiers and the troops loved him. His success as an entertainer is underscored by his numerous singing and acting accolades: he was the top box office draw for over a decade, he sang on many platinum and gold records, a number of his songs that appeared in films that won Academy awards, and he even won an Oscar for Best Actor. In 1962, Crosby won the first Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award.

[[Image:Crosby-fig1-lg.jpg|center|frame|Bing Crosby (right) and co-star Barry Fitzgerald with their Oscars from the 1944 film “Going My Way.” (Photo: Courtesy of BCE Inc.)]]

Crosby was also an astute businessman. Not only was he an investor in the business of radio and television; at one point, in 1948, he became a large investor in the Vacuum Foods Corp., which pioneered the first orange juice frozen concentrate. The company later changed its name to Minute Maid. Not content to be just an investor, Crosby obtained sole distribution rights for the West Coast.

[[Image:Crosby-fig2-lg.jpg|center|frame|(Photo: Courtesy of BCE Inc.)]]

He had part ownership in the Pittsburgh Pirates baseball team and owned extensive real estate holdings, including oil drilling operations. Though he is well known as an entertainer, and to a lesser degree as a businessman, very few people think of Bing Crosby as a champion of innovation in radio and television broadcast technology.

His first foray with technical innovation stemmed from his growing dislike for doing live radio shows. In 1936, Crosby became the host of the Kraft Music Hall, a musical variety show. For over a decade the Kraft Music Hall, which aired on the NBC network, remained a very popular feature on American radio. These shows were always broadcast live. By 1945, Crosby felt that the time commitment of a weekly live radio show had become an unacceptable burden on his family life. Crosby's desire to pre-record the show put him on a collision course with NBC executives, who refused to consider any option other than a live broadcast. Crosby refused to do the show. NBC sued, forcing him to finish the 1945-46 season. Looking to increase its ratings, ABC approached Crosby with an offer. He could pre-record his own show, but with one proviso: the quality had to be as good as a live broadcast. Crosby accepted and immediately threw himself into using the recording technology of the day, electrical transcription, a phonographic disc format which had been developed for radio in the late 1920s.

Crosby's 30-minute show was called the Philco Radio Hour. Two discs were needed to record the show. Very quickly, Crosby discovered the weaknesses of electrical transcription technology: the sound quality was inferior to the live broadcast; and editing, which is one of the great potential benefits of pre-recording, was very cumbersome. The inferiority of the technology hurt the show's ratings. With his show struggling, Crosby was receptive to any new recording technology that would improve the show's audio quality. John T. (Jack) Mullin, an electrical engineer, working with wartime German technology, would provide the answer.

Born in San Francisco in 1913, Mullin attended Santa Clara University and majored in electrical engineering. During World War II, he worked on a variety of wartime electronic projects. While in England, Mullin was struck by the quality of pre-recorded music broadcast from German radio stations. Electrical transcription technology could never produce this exceptionally high quality. “How were the Germans doing it?” he wondered. In 1944, he got his answer. That year he was sent to Paris to examine captured German electronics equipment. At one point, he visited a German radio station where he discovered the AEG Magnetophon K-4 studio magnetic tape recording machine. Given permission by the U.S. government, Mullin brought two units back with him, along with 50 reels of blank magnetic tape made by I.G. Farben. The I. G. had been created from a merger of several German firms, most notably Bayer, Hoechst, AGFA, and BASF, and by the 1930s, the I.G. was the world’s largest chemical manufacturer.

As soon as he returned to the United States, Mullin set about improving the quality of the AEG Magnetophon machines. He changed the recorder's bias circuitry to further improve the signal-to-noise ratio, added pre-emphasis for higher frequencies, and replaced all the components with standard U.S. parts. Together with his partner W.A. Palmer, in 1946, he produced their improved version of the AEG machine. This magnetic tape recorder was first demonstrated at a 1946 meeting of the Institute of Radio Engineers (IRE) in San Francisco. The engineers, who were at the demo, all marveled at the high quality of the recording. Though it was a technical "tour de force," no one in the entertainment industry was ready yet to embrace it, until Mullin demonstrated the machine to Crosby in 1947. Immediately, Crosby asked Mullin to do a test recording of the Philco Radio Hour's first show of the 1947-48 season. Not only did the quality of this recording rival the live broadcast, but it also offered superior editing capabilities. Crosby was ready to pre-record his shows for the entire season, but he and his team had two concerns: would there be an adequate supply of recording devices and, if so, would there be enough magnetic tape to feed them? The season was about to start and Mullin had only his two machines. Enter Ampex and 3M.

Ampex, founded in 1944 in the San Francisco Bay area, produced small electrical motors and generators for the war effort. After the war, Ampex had to rethink its product line. Company founder Alexander Poniatoff decided to gamble its entire future on magnetic recording technology. Working with Mullin, its engineers produced two prototype units that worked well. Now the challenge was to go into production, but Ampex was unable to raise the needed capital. When Crosby heard of the difficulty he sent Poniatoff a check for $50,000 — a considerable amount of money for 1947. Crosby was determined to use this technology. His commitment did not stop there. He also invested money in Minnesota Mining and Manufacturing (3M), the company that was to produce a reliable supply of good quality magnetic tape. "[3M] ... had started development of their new red oxide tape that would work with the Ampex recorder. Jack Mullin began to work with Robert Herr and William Wetzel of 3M conducting tests to help develop a high quality magnetic tape for audio recording. ... The result was the Scotch Magnetic Tape No.111 that later evolved into the No. 111A that became the standard of the recording industry." Crosby recognized the long-term potential of this technology beyond his own radio program. As he did with Minute Maid, Crosby obtained exclusive west coast distribution rights from Ampex and 3M. After Crosby's entry into magnetic pre-recording, other radio programming followed suit. The 3 May 1948 issue of Newsweek featured this breakthrough in recording technology.

No sooner had Crosby adopted magnetic pre-recording than the "laugh track" was introduced for the first time on radio. Removing small mistakes on a tape had created short gaps in time. To fill in these empty spaces, Crosby suggested to his technicians that they introduce pre-recorded laughter after those jokes that he liked. Magnetic recording prompted other innovative applications like the 1948 show Candid Microphone. The creator of the program, Allen Funt, would go out and put unsuspecting individuals in awkward, but humorous situations, secretly tape their responses, and then play back the responses on radio. Funt later adapted this strategy to television with the popular show Candid Camera.

Crosby was not merely content to finance the innovation of others; he also saw the need to develop an in-house capacity to innovate. For the Kraft Music Hour, NBC had provided the engineering know-how to produce the show. But with ABC, Crosby wanted to use his own in-house audio engineering expertise. So in 1948, he created the Electronics Division within Bing Crosby Enterprises and hired Mullin as its “Chief Engineer.” Frank Healy, who was a former Hollywood producer, headed up the Electronics Division. When Crosby moved into television, he immediately thought of pre-recording his shows. The only technology available at the time was through film, which Crosby used in his early shows. As early as 1951, Crosby had asked Mullin if television broadcasts could be taped like radio. Mullin replied there was no reason why such a system could not be developed. At this point, Crosby created an R&D component within the Electronics Division and poured money into this quest to invent the first video recorder for television broadcasting, which at this point was still in black and white.

In November of 1951, Mullin demonstrated a prototype of a video recorder to the Hollywood press. Though still a very crude device, Healy used his talents as producer to convince the press corps of the machine’s great potential. The demo made the news in Variety. In a sense, this demo was the shot fired that started the race to invent a commercial video recorder. Ampex jumped in. RCA’s giant R&D machine also jumped in. But its goal was more ambitious — to invent a recorder for color television. Mullin soon discovered that moving from a crude prototype to a commercial machine proved much harder than he could have ever imagined. Crosby's first TV show had to be pre-recorded through syncing magnetic audio recording with 35mm film recording. Crosby's Electronics Division was not the only group trying to invent the video recorder. Crosby, pragmatically backing two horses, also encouraged the Ampex group.

[[Image:Crosby-fig3.jpg|center|frame|The BCE Mark II video recorder in early 1953. (l-r) Jack Mullin, Bing Crosby, and Wayne Johnson. (Photo: Courtesy of Robert Phillips)]]

Robert R. Phillips, today an IEEE Life Member, was one of the engineers working at the BCE Electronics Division in 1951. He recalls that in 1953, "David Sarnoff of RCA and his board of directors visited BCE to see if they could buy our [black and white] recorder. The party arrived in a number of black limousines. Sarnoff was in the first, dressed in gray, and the board in the rest, dressed in black. As Sarnoff marched up the driveway the board fell in behind him two-by-two. They went into our small laboratory for the demonstration. Sarnoff sat in the middle and the board on either side of him. After the demonstration they went upstairs to the conference room. Sarnoff said to Frank Healy that he wanted to buy the recorder, and Frank told him it was not for sale. Sarnoff told Frank that he would just buy us out; to which Frank replied 'You do not have enough money!' The RCA group left."

In 1956, Ampex won the video recorder race, at least for black and white broadcasting. A day before the official start of the annual convention of National Association of Radio and Television Broadcasters (NARTB) in Chicago, Ampex staged a successful demo of their video recorder. The 300 invited guests from the networks were caught completely off guard. They did not know that they were coming to see the first video recorder. As the guests sat listening to the VP of ABC give a speech, little did they know that it was being recorded. Then the curtains opened as the speech was replayed on several televisions around the room. After a few moments of stunned silence, the crowd broke into applause and stomped their feet in approval. Word of the video recorder spread like wildfire throughout the convention. The crowds wanting to see it were enormous.

For Crosby, the 1956 demo was not news. Because of his close ties to Ampex, he had known for a while that it had beaten his group to the video recorder. In 1955, Crosby sent Mullin over to examine the video recorder that Ampex was working on. Mullin returned with the bad news. The Ampex system was superior to theirs. Even though the Ampex machine wasn't quite ready for sale, Crosby wrote another $50,000 check to Ampex; but this time for the first machine when it was ready. This purchase effectively put an end to video recorder development at BCE. The design know-how built up at BCE was not wasted, however. Working closely with Ampex, the Crosby group developed technology to record rocket telemetry data for the U.S. military. In 1956, the video recorder work at BCE was shut down and the Electronics Division shifted its focus to an airborne wideband recorder for the U.S. Air Force. Using the knowledge gained in its approach to video recording, the Electronics Division saw an opportunity. With Ampex focused on the rotary head technology that chopped some types of signals, there was an opening for wideband longitudinal recording that had no head switching. With the move to military design, the activities of the Electronics Division started to diverge from BCE's business focus. Crosby's close association with 3M created an opportunity for him to sell off the Electronics Division. 3M found itself getting into magnetic recording hardware as a natural complement to its tape business. In August 1956, 3M decided to buy the Electronics Division. In 1957, with the Air Force contract completed, 3M formally acquired the Electronics Division.

[[Image:Crosby-fig4-lg.jpg|center|frame|David Bowie and Bing Crosby singing together.
(Photo: Courtesy of BCE Inc.)]]

In September 1977, Bing Crosby pre-recorded his last television show in London, U.K, with the rock star David Bowie. Just a month later, on 14 October 1977, the remarkable life of this entertainer, businessman, and champion of recording technology came to an end. The show aired on 30 November 1977. This year, 2012, on the 35th anniversary of his death, Crosby’s talents live on through a technology that he helped champion.

== Further Reading ==

For an in-depth look at the work done in the Electronic Division at Bing Crosby Enterprises, read the [[First-Hand:Bing Crosby and the Recording Revolution|fascinating personal account by Robert Phillips]]

For a more information on Bing Crosby's life, the reader is encouraged to go to the official Bing Crosby site http://bingcrosby.com/. The author thanks BingCrosby.com for permission to use of its images.

For concise look at Jack Mullins technical contributions, see the article published by the Audio Engineering Society http://www.aes.org/aeshc/docs/jaes.obit/JAES_V47_9_PG776.pdf

[[First-Hand:My Ten Years at Ampex and the Development of the Video Recorder|A detailed first-hand account on the development of the Ampex Video Recorder (Mark IV) by Fred Pfost]], one of the key engineers on the project

The reference to Allen Funt’s Candid Microphone Show, came from the article “New Fields for Tape in Radio” that appeared in July 1948 issue of 3M corporation newsletter Megaphone.

[[Category:Communications]]
[[Category:Signals]]
[[Category:Signal_generation_&_recording]]
[[Category:Audio_recording]]
[[Category:Video_recording]]

Bulletin Board Systems

2013-05-13T13:05:52Z

Administrator1:

== Bulletin Board Systems ==

[[Image:Bbs-1.jpg|thumb|right|Ward Christiansen with CBBS, the first BBS. Courtesy Jason Scott]]

[[Image:Bbs-2.jpg|thumb|right|Hayes Smartmodem. Courtesy Michael Pereckas]]

[[Image:Bbs-3.jpg|thumb|right|Trade Wars 2002 ANSI opening screen]]

Over the past twenty years, the Internet has dramatically transformed the way society exchanges information and communicates with one another. The modern internet has its roots in [[Milestones:Inception of the ARPANET, 1969|ARPANET]], which was first launched in 1969. But the general public would have to wait several decades before it could use this communications technology. Before the [[Timothy Berners-Lee|World Wide Web]] became popular in the mid 1990s, millions of people used bulletin board systems as their primary method of getting online. Accessible through dial-up modems, bulletin board systems (BBSs) were the first method that the general public widely used to communicate with other people through their computers.

The transmission of data through the phone line predates both ARPANET and the BBS. A modem, short for Modulator-Demodulator, modulates digital information into an analog carrier signal which can be transmitted through the phone lines. On the other end, the modem takes the carrier signal and demodulates into digital information which can be processed through the computer. Early modems were introduced during World War II to transmit [[STARS:Early Punched Card Equipment, 1880 - 1951|punched card data]]. The first commercially available modem was the Bell 101 dataset, introduced in 1958.The Bell 101 allowed for the transmission of data at 110 baud. It was based on a 1954 modem that Bell designed exclusively for use with the military’s the SAGE air ground control system. 1962 saw the 103a dataset, which allowed for the transmission of data at 300 baud. The “baud” unit of measurement was named after Émile Baudot, and represented the amount of bits per second a modem could transfer. The 300 baud speed remained the standard for the next 20 years.

In 1975, computer hobbyist Ward Christiansen purchased an [[Altair|Altair]] and at a local computer hobby group, Chicago Area Computer Hobbyists’ Exchange (CACHE), met fellow hobbyist Randy Suess. Christiansen has purchased an Altair 8800, and in 1977, Hayes Microcomputer Products introduced the 80-103A modem, which was compatible with the Bell 103a dataset and designed to run on the Altair 8800 S-100 bus. By 1978, there was no standard media format between different computer manufacturers, which posed a logistical problem for transferring files between different architectures. After the introduction of the 80-103A modem, Christiansen conceived of the idea of using the phone lines to create a bulletin board system for CACHE, to exchange messages with one another across different hardware platforms. After a blizzard in January of 1978, Christiansen worked with Suess over the course of the next month developing the Computerized Bulletin Board System software, or CBBS, which launched on February 16th, 1978. Users could dial into CBBS, read what messages have been previously posted, and reply to messages left by other users.

The CBBS software spread across the nation. The idea of a computerized bulletin board system immediately resonated with computer hobbyists, and much of the language and structure of CBBS was adopted by subsequent BBS software. Early BBS’s did not display text to screens, but instead fed data to a printer. Operating a modem was a difficult task which ensured that nearly all early BBS users were computer hobbyists. This changed in 1981 with the introduction the Hayes Smartmodem in 1981, which operated through the serial port allowing the computer to send it commands for automatic dialing. This eliminated much of the difficulty with installing and using a modem, as the dialing would be done though software. Together with the rising popularity of the personal computer, which replaced the computer kit, a new group of younger and less technically savvy users could now participate in BBS’s. Different BBS software packages were developed to run on different hardware platforms including the Atari, TRS-80, Commodores and Apple.

The bulletin board system was initially intended for the sharing and replying to messages but it quickly took on other features, most notably file sharing. The BBS was also the first massively multiplayer online gaming environment. Games like Trade Wars 2002 and Solar Realms Elite were large turn based strategy games. As the early BBS games, referred to as “door games”, were not designed to host multiple players concurrently, many games adopted the format of having a set amount of turns per day to ensure fairness between the players. Many BBS games adopted 16 color ANSI artwork. In 1993, RIPscrip was introduced, which was capable of a finer EGA resolution.

In the early 1980s, BBS’s were often machines that were only connected to the individual users who dialed in, and were not part of a larger network. The first BBS software to network with another BBS was Fido BBS. Originally designed to work on a DEC Rainbow, Fido was reworked in 1984 to network with other Fido BBS’s and exchange shared messages and files. Fidonet provided for a massive worldwide network of BBS’s that allowed for the large scale sharing of massive amounts of data that which was downloaded between regions and transferred to individual nodes daily. By 1985 there were 400 Fidonet nodes. The system rapidly increased with time, peaking with 35,787 nodes in 1995.

Modem speeds became the limiting factor for transferring of large amounts of data. 300 baud transferred roughly at a rate of 30 characters per second, about the rate one can read. However, for large data files, transferring at 300 baud could take hours, or even days. Echo cancellation allowed for higher modem speeds and the V.32 standard, allowing for 9600 baud speeds, was introduced in 1984. The V.32bis standard was introduced in 1991, based on parity check coding and trellis modulation methods described by [[Oral-History:Gottfried Ungerboeck|Gottfried Ungerboeck]] in a 1982 paper, and allowed for 14,400 baud speeds. These high speeds which became affordable by the early 1990s, led to a massive expansion of BBS popularity. In 1988 there were an estimated 5,000 BBS’s in the United States. This grew to an estimated 25,000 by 1992.

Alongside the rapid popularity explosion of the BBS came concurrent developments in internet technology. Using hypertext, both Gopher and the World Wide Web were launched in 1991. 1993 saw the introduction of Mosaic, the first graphical browser. Before this, the World Wide Web was accessed through text-only browsers like Lynx. Mosaic allowed for much easier and user friendly access to the World Wide Web, and instantly became popular. .

Due to growing demands, many BBS Sysops used their modem infrastructure to accommodate internet access as well, and ran their bulletin boards side by side with an internet connection. Many of the first commercial internet service providers started out this way, and by 1995 access to the internet quickly overshadowed the BBS. In the late 1990s, the number of BBS’s fell as quickly as it rose in the early 1990s. By 1997 there was an estimated 10,000 BBS’s active in the United States, down from an estimated 45,000 in 1995.

The internet and World Wide Web have evolved a great deal since Mosaic’s introduction in 1993. Billions of people are connected to the internet throughout the globe. However, BBS’s still are not completely dead. While their numbers are estimated to be in the hundreds today, some remain active. Most of today’s BBS’s can be accessed via the telnet protocol through the internet, though some still maintain the ability to connect through the phone line. BBS’s also still enjoy popularity in regions of the world where high speed internet is still not implemented. A vast amount of archival text and art from BBS culture have been preserved at http://www.textfiles.com/. Even though internet speeds today are over thirty thousand times as fast as the original 300 baud modems, and internet infrastructure and usage is far more complex and vast than Fidonet at its peak had to offer, it was an important first step in the development towards today’s online community.

[[Category:Computers_and_information_processing]]

IEEE Binghamton University Student Branch History

2013-04-19T15:33:25Z

Administrator1: Created page with "== History of IEEE Fields at Binghamton University == Prepared and maintained by the IEEE Student Branch at Binghamton University. The IEEE Student Branch at Binghamton Univers..."

== History of IEEE Fields at Binghamton University ==

Prepared and maintained by the IEEE Student Branch at Binghamton University.

The IEEE Student Branch at Binghamton University was established in NNNN to serve students in the Electrical Engineering Department, but now welcomes students in all IEEE Fields. A list of the current officers with contact information and a description of the current activities of the Student Branch are to be [http://www2.binghamton.edu/watson/about/clubs-and-orgs.html#ieee found on its website].

A year-by-year list of its officers and a summary of its activities can be found on the IEEE Global History Network for prior years. Each of the years in the following table which is a linked to the archived formation for that year.

[upload the annual reports; create the table with links to the uploaded reports]

=== About the Institution ===

[http://www.binghamton.edu/index.php Link to University Website]

=== Thomas J. Watson School of Engineering and Applied Science History ===

[http://www.binghamton.edu/watson/ Link to Thomas J. Watson School of Engineering and Applied Science]

{{DEFAULTSORT:Binghamton}}

[[Category:IEEE]]
[[Category:Geographical_units]]
[[Category:Student_branches]]

IEEE Syracuse University Student Branch History

2013-04-19T15:24:22Z

Administrator1: Created page with "== History of IEEE Fields at Syracuse University == Prepared and maintained by the IEEE Student Branch at Syracuse University. The IEEE Student Branch at Syracuse University wa..."

== History of IEEE Fields at Syracuse University ==

Prepared and maintained by the IEEE Student Branch at Syracuse University.

The IEEE Student Branch at Syracuse University was established in NNNN to serve students in the Electrical Engineering Department, but now welcomes students in all IEEE Fields. A list of the current officers with contact information and a description of the current activities of the Student Branch are to be [http://ewh.ieee.org/sb/syracuse/su/ found on its website].

A year-by-year list of its officers and a summary of its activities can be found on the IEEE Global History Network for prior years. Each of the years in the following table which is a linked to the archived formation for that year.

[upload the annual reports; create the table with links to the uploaded reports]

=== About the Institution ===

[http://syr.edu/ Link to University Website]

=== L.C. Smith College of Engineering and Computer Science History ===

[http://www.lcs.syr.edu/ Link to L.C. Smith College of Engineering and Computer Science]

{{DEFAULTSORT:Syracuse}}

[[Category:IEEE]]
[[Category:Geographical_units]]
[[Category:Student_branches]]

IEEE Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute Student Branch History

2013-04-19T15:18:46Z

Administrator1: Created page with "== History of IEEE Fields at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute == Prepared and maintained by the IEEE Student Branch at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute . The IEEE Student Branc..."

== History of IEEE Fields at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute ==

Prepared and maintained by the IEEE Student Branch at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute .

The IEEE Student Branch at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute was established in NNNN to serve students in the Electrical Engineering Department, but now welcomes students in all IEEE Fields. A list of the current officers with contact information and a description of the current activities of the Student Branch are to be [http://www.ecse.rpi.edu/homepages/ieee/ found on its website].

A year-by-year list of its officers and a summary of its activities can be found on the IEEE Global History Network for prior years. Each of the years in the following table which is a linked to the archived formation for that year.

[upload the annual reports; create the table with links to the uploaded reports]

=== About the Institution ===

[http://www.rpi.edu/ Link to University Website]

=== School of Engineering History ===

[http://eng.rpi.edu/ Link to School of Engineering]

{{DEFAULTSORT:Rensselaer}}

[[Category:IEEE]]
[[Category:Geographical_units]]
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Hardy J Pottinger

2013-04-11T22:18:16Z

Administrator1:

== Hardy J Pottinger III ==

Dr. Hardy J. Pottinger received a Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering from the Missouri University of Science and Technology in 1973. He is a senior member of the IEEE, and a member of the [[IEEE Computer Society History|IEEE Computer Society]]. He was chairman of the IEEE-USA Pre-college Education Committee from 2003 to 2004. He was the faculty advisor for [[IEEE Missouri University of Science and Technology Student Branch History|the student branch of IEEE at MST (UMR)]] from 1987 to 2002 and served as chairman of the [[IEEE Saint Louis Section History|St. Louis Section of IEEE]] in 1997. He was awarded the IEEE Region 5 Outstanding Engineering Educator in 1999. From 1979 to 2002 he was a professor in the Electrical and Computer Engineering Department at UM-Rolla and Assistant Chairman for Computer Engineering from 2000-2002. He currently serves as IEEE Region 5 Electronic Communications Coordinator and St. Louis Section Historian. He and his wife Judy retired in 2002 and enjoy traveling, square dancing, and genealogy.

{{DEFAULTSORT:Pottinger}}

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[[Category:Governance]]

IEEE Drexel University Student Branch History

2013-04-10T19:00:37Z

Administrator1:

== History of IEEE Fields at Drexel University ==

Prepared and maintained by the IEEE Student Branch at Drexel University.

The IEEE Student Branch at Drexel University was established in NNNN to serve students in the Electrical Engineering Department, but now welcomes students in all IEEE Fields. A list of the current officers with contact information and a description of the current activities of the Student Branch are to be [http://www.drexelieee.org/ found on its website].

A year-by-year list of its officers and a summary of its activities can be found on the IEEE Global History Network for prior years. Each of the years in the following table which is a linked to the archived formation for that year.

[upload the annual reports; create the table with links to the uploaded reports]

=== About the Institution ===

[http://www.drexel.edu Link to University Website]

=== College of Engineering History ===

[http://drexel.edu/engineering/ Link to College of Engineering]

{{DEFAULTSORT:Drexel}}

[[Category:Student_branches]]

IEEE John Hopkins University Student Branch History

2013-04-10T17:10:34Z

Administrator1: moved IEEE John Hopkins University Student Branch History to IEEE Johns Hopkins University Student Branch History

== History of IEEE Fields at Johns Hopkins University ==

Prepared and maintained by the IEEE Student Branch at Johns Hopkins University.

The IEEE Student Branch at Johns Hopkins University (JHU) was established in NNNN to serve students in the Electrical Engineering Department, but now welcomes students in all IEEE Fields. A list of the current officers with contact information and a description of the current activities of the Student Branch are to be [http://ieee.ece.jhu.edu/ found on its website].

A year-by-year list of its officers and a summary of its activities can be found on the IEEE Global History Network for prior years. Each of the years in the following table which is a linked to the archived formation for that year.

[upload the annual reports; create the table with links to the uploaded reports]

=== About the Institution ===

[http://www.jhu.edu/ Link to University Website]

[http://old.library.jhu.edu/collections/specialcollections/archives/ Link to JHU archives with its links to documents pertaining to the history of JHU.]

=== Whiting School of Engineering History ===

[http://engineering.jhu.edu/ Link to Whiting School of Engineering]

== Further Reading ==

[[Media:JHU legacy-circle-presentation.pdf|A brief history of JHU and the engineering school prepared by the JHU Senior Reference Archivist Jim Stimpert.]]

{{DEFAULTSORT:John}}

[[Category:Student_branches]]

Robert Wilensky

2013-04-05T14:16:18Z

Administrator1: Created page with "== Biography == Born: March 26, 1951 Died: March 15, 2013 Robert Wilensky was born in Brooklyn on March 26, 1951 and received his bachelor’s degree in mathematics in 1972 an..."

== Biography ==

Born: March 26, 1951

Died: March 15, 2013

Robert Wilensky was born in Brooklyn on March 26, 1951 and received his bachelor’s degree in mathematics in 1972 and his Ph.D. in computer science in 1978 from Yale University. After graduation from Yale, Wilensky moved to UC Berkeley where his career spanned nearly 30 years in memory processes in natural language processing, language analysis and production and artificial intelligence in programming languages. Wilensky served as chair of the Computer Science division and was instrumental in creating the UC Berkeley Digital Library Project.

{{DEFAULTSORT:Wilensky}}

[[Category:Computers_and_information_processing]]
[[Category:Computer_science]]

Motoji Shibusawa

2013-04-04T20:24:13Z

Tjeffres: Created page with "== Biography == (Associate 1905) '''Honorary Member 1929''' MOTOJI Shibusawa, dean of the faculty of engineering and professor of electrical engineering at the Tokyo (Japan) ..."

== Biography ==

(Associate 1905)

'''Honorary Member 1929'''

MOTOJI Shibusawa, dean of the faculty of engineering and professor of electrical engineering at the Tokyo (Japan) Imperial University, and also engineer of the Department of Communication, Japan, was elected an Honorary Member of the Institute on August 6, 1929. He was born, October 25, 1876, in Japan, and graduated in electrical engineering at Tokyo Imperial University in 1900. Following one year in the army service, he spent the period between 1901 and 1906 in study at different universities and in gaining practical experience at industrial plants, in several European countries and in the United States. Returning to Japan, he was appointed engineer of the department of communication in 1906, serving at the electrotechnical laboratory. In 1909 he was appointed to the additional post of engineer of the Imperial Railway Board. In 1911 he obtained the academic degree of doctor of engineering at the Tokyo Imperial University. In 1919 he was appointed engineer-in-chief, bureau of electricity, ministry of communication, and in that year he took the additional post of professor of the Tokyo Imperial University, to which later post he was definitely transferred in 1924. He was appointed dean of the faculty of engineering in 1929. Subsequently, he received promotions in both academic and business posts, and served the government on several special bureaus. In 1924 he was elected president of the Institute of Electrical Engineers, of Japan, and has been president of the Japan Electric Technical Committee, and has received many other honors.

[[Category:Communications]]
[[Category:Engineering_education]]
[[Category:IEEE]]
[[Category:Awards_&_fellow_activities]]
[[Category:History_&_heritage]]
[[Category:Prominent_members]]
[[Category:People_and_organizations]]
[[Category:Engineers]]
[[Category:Universities]]

George A. Hamilton

2013-04-04T19:42:56Z

Beichner:

== Biography ==

GEORGE ANSON HAMILTON, vice-president 1884-86, and national treasurer for the 35-year period 1895-1930, was elected an Honorary Member of the Institute May 22, 1933. In addition to this unusual record of service, Mr. Hamilton served on the Edison Medal and executive committees for a great many years, and on the first editing committee and the committee on permanent quarters. He was a member of the original committee of 5 on organization. Mr. Hamilton was born at Cleveland, Ohio, December 30, 1843. Between 1860 and 1873, he was in telegraph and railway signaling service. During 1873-75 he was assistant to [[Moses G. Farmer|Prof. Moses G. Farmer]], an Honorary Member of the Institute, and a pioneer electrical inventor. Here Mr. Hamilton received much valuable experience. In 1875 he became assistant electrician of the Western Union Telegraph Company, New York, N.Y., being appointed chief electrician of the repair expedition of the Key West-Havana Cable the following year. In 1889 he became engineer for the Western Electric Company, New York, N.Y., supervising the production of fine electrical instruments. He retained this position until his retirement in 1909. Mr. Hamilton is a member of the Institution of Electrical Engineers (Great Britain), Société Française des Électriciens, Société Française de Physique, and Société Belge d'Astronomie.

== Professional Honors ==

(A'84, M'84, F'13, member for life)

'''Honorary Member 1933'''

[[Category:Telegraphy]]
[[Category:IEEE]]
[[Category:Awards_&_fellow_activities]]
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[[Category:History_&_heritage]]
[[Category:Prominent_members]]
[[Category:People_and_organizations]]
[[Category:Engineers]]

Cyrus W. Field

2013-03-28T20:13:30Z

Tjeffres:

== [[Image:Field_Cyrus.jpg|thumb|right]]Biography and Professional Honors ==

'''Honorary Member 1892'''

CYRUS West Field, promotor of submarine telegraphy, was elected an Honorary Member of the Institute May 17, 1892. Like many of those connected with the early history of the Institute, his principal activity was in the telegraph industry.

He was born November 30, 1819, in Stockbridge, Mass. At the age of 15 he entered a mercantile house in New York, but when about 20, went into business for himself and soon became prosperous. In 1853 he partially retired and spent several months in travel. Meeting a Canadian engineer, who had attempted to lay a subterranean telegraph line across Newfoundland, Mr. Field's imagination was immediately fired with the idea of laying a submarine cable across the Atlantic ocean. From this time, January 1854, until the transatlantic cable was successfully completed July 27, 1866, Mr. Field worked unceasingly in the accomplishment of this endeavor. He put a large part of his own funds into the enterprise, and succeeded in interesting many others in the venture. The first cable was received from England and was to be laid across the Gulf of St Lawrence, but during a gale the cable was cut in order to save the ship after 40 miles had been laid. Additional financing, which became necessary, was secured in England, and by an appropriation of the U.S. Congress. Starting from the shore of England, 335 miles of cable were laid, when the cable parted on August 11, 1857. In 1858, a cable was started from each shore, and after considerable difficulty, was spliced on July 29. While celebration of this event was going on, the cable parted, and it was not until 1865 that the work of laying the cable was again begun. The now famous steamship "Great Eastern" was used in this endeavor, and after unsuccessful attempts, the laying was completed in 1866. Many honors were bestowed upon Mr. Field in the United States, England, France, and Italy, for his success. Mr. Field subsequently became interested in the development of elevated railways in New York City, and in other submarine cables. His death occurred July 11, 1892.

Mr. Field shared with Professor Farmer the distinction of being the only American elected to honorary membership until the election of Thomas A. Edison in 1928.

[[Category:Telegraphy]]
[[Category:Submarine_telegraphy]]
[[Category:IEEE]]
[[Category:People_and_organizations]]
[[Category:Rail_transportation]]

Iannis Xenakis

2013-03-25T15:26:03Z

Administrator1: Created page with "''This Article is a stub, you can expand it by clicking on the Edit button'' Iannis Xenakis was an experimental electronic music composer. "

''This Article is a stub, you can expand it by clicking on the Edit button''

Iannis Xenakis was an experimental electronic music composer.

Oral History: Joe Butler

2013-03-19T16:24:42Z

Administrator1:

==About Joe Butler==

Joseph (Joe) Butler was born in Portland, Maine on August 1st, 1945. The family lived in Maine for a few years, then in several places in Massachusetts. Butler graduated from Merrimack College in North Andover, Massachusetts with a Bachelor of Science in Engineering Physics in 1967. Fresh out of college he worked part-time at different places but not in the engineering field. He went on to pursue an master's degree in physics at Williams College Massachusetts. Upon completion of the degree, he took a position with RCA Aerospace Systems in Burlington, Massachusetts. He later acquired an MBA from Northeaster University.

His first project at RCA Aerospace systems was for helicopter searchlight systems. He was originally involved in the environmental test group then moved to work on EMI (Electromagnetic Interference) at Raytheon. He stayed there nine years working on exclusively military EMI issues. In 1986 he joined Chomerics where he is now Marketing Manager for the Chomerics Division of the Parker Hannifin Corporation.

In 1998 he became Vice President of the IEEE Electromagnetic Compatibility Society (EMCS). In 2000-2001 he was president of the IEEE EMCS and in 2002-2004immediate past president. He is also a past member of the IEEE EMCS Standards Committee and has been involved with EMC standards development with the American National Standards Institute (ANSI), the American Society for Testing and Materials (ASTM), the Association for the Advancement for Medical Instrumentation (AAMI) and the SAE (Society of Automotive Engineers). He has also previously been involved with EMC standards work with the Radio Technical Commission for Aeronautics (RTCA), and the Electronic Industries Alliance (EIA). He is a National Association of Radio and Telecommunications Engineers (NARTE) certified EMC engineer and is a past member of the Board of Directors of NARTE.

==About the Interview==

Joe Butler: An Interview Conducted by Mike Geselowitz, IEEE History Center, August 8, 2012.
Interview #618 for the IEEE History Center The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, Inc.

==Copyright Statement==

This manuscript is being made available for research purposes only. All literary rights in the manuscript, including the right to publish, are reserved to the IEEE History Center. No part of the manuscript may be quoted for publication without the written permission of the Director of IEEE History Center.
Request for permission to quote for publication should be addressed to the IEEE History Center Oral History Program, 39 Union Street, New Brunswick, NJ 08901-8538 USA. It should include identification of the specific passages to be quoted, anticipated use of the passages, and identification of the user.
It is recommended that this oral history be cited as follows:
Joe Butler, an oral history conducted in 2012 by Mike Geselowitz, IEEE History Center, New Brunswick, NJ, USA.

==Interview==

INTERVIEWEE:Joe Butler

INTERVIEWER:Mike Geselowitz

DATE:8 August 2012

PLACE:Pittsburgh, PA

===Beginnings===

'''Geselowitz:'''

This is Mike Geselowitz at the IEEE History Center and I'm here with Joe Butler who is a past president of the IEE Electromagnetic Compatibility Society. We're here in Pittsburgh at the EMC Symposium and I'm conducting an oral history interview on his career and his professional career with EMC. Joe, if you would, I'd like to start at the very beginning with where you were born and then what your education was.

'''Butler:'''

Okay. I was born in Portland, Maine on August 1st, 1945, just after World War II. I lived in Maine for a number of years and then moved several places in Massachusetts, and went to high school in Massachusetts, north of Boston. I went to Merrimack College in North Andover Mass where I started out majoring in mathematics because I was good in math in high school. It became obvious after the first year of mathematics, where mathematics is just a lot of heavy duty equations, that I was not sure what to do with it all. I was intrigued that there was a physics department at Merrimack College and switched my major to engineering physics so I could do physics and engineering. It's a unique degree that's not offered many places, but you get a bit of everything of mechanical, civil, and electrical engineering, as well as some basic physics, and I graduated with a Bachelor of Science in Engineering Physics.

'''Geselowitz:'''

And what year was that?

'''Butler:'''

That was in 1967. I had been working part-time at different places but not in the engineering field. That summer I did do some part-time work at RCA in Burlington, Massachusetts, but it became necessary to advance my career. At that time it was the Vietnam War, and you were going to be in the army if you didn't do anything. I applied to Williams College in Williamstown Mass, which is a very exclusive school in the westernmost part of Massachusetts. They had a graduate program in physics and they only took six people. In joining that two-year course you became automatically a teaching assistant, so you were required to teach labs, do recitation sections on homework, and it was a fulltime job. You were paid and at the same time you went to school, days and nights depending on the curriculum, and I had to do a thesis. I spent two years at Williams College and during those two years they changed the draft laws a number of times. I did go and was classified 1A, and at the end of my first year I had to change my status from student to teacher.

I went to MIT for the summer, finished some coursework, and then when I started my second year at Williams College. I became an instructor and was part of the faculty at Williams College and I got a deferment for that. I'd finished my Masters at Williams and at the time, once again facing the prospect of going to war, I applied for and got a job at RCA Aerospace systems in Burlington Mass and they assigned me to a project for helicopter searchlight systems. I got a deferment for the war effort for working on military hardware, eventually spending a couple of years there. They changed the rules again and at that time they had the draft lottery so you had to put your name in for one year and every month they drew out birthdates. In my town they went to 120 drawn people for the draft. My number was 125. After risking my time, I would've gone, hopefully by that time with a Master's in Physics, I would have been teaching somewhere, but I was going to go if I was called. But I didn't get drafted, so after putting my number up for a year, I was now free to stay there. So, I stayed at RCA. I was in the environmental test group but the EMI group was at the same locale.

'''Geselowitz:'''

So EMI is…?

'''Butler:'''

Electromagnetic Interference; and since my background was in physics more so than mechanical and environmental testing, I shifted over and started doing work in the EMI group as a novice test engineer. They taught me how to use some of the most rudimentary EMI test equipment left over from World War II, some of which is on the floor here at the symposium; the Empire devices NF-105 is one of the older EMI receivers in our business. There are two different versions of it down on the floor now shown for historical purposes.

'''Geselowitz:'''

Who's exhibiting that?

'''Butler:'''

The IEEE EMC Society has a booth here with one in it, and then one of the Retlif Testing Laboratories has a refurbished unit that looks like it just came off the assembly line floor. They're both demonstrating it as one of the early origins of the EMI business, and I started with that so I'm part of that group of people.

'''Geselowitz:'''

What problems was that group working on?

'''Butler:'''

It was almost all military at that time. EMI first reared its ugly head back in World War II with some radio communications; hence, in the early days it was called RFI, radio frequency interference. They had RFI receivers that if you had a piece of military hardware, you wanted to put it in a metal chamber, use this receiver and measure what radio or electromagnetic signals came out of it. You wanted to be sure that the signals that came out of it weren't on the same frequencies as the communications equipment, which was the problem. All of us who started way back when learned how to use this NF-105 receiver to make the measurements. The idea of doing analysis to the problem was very new. It was all slide rules. Calculators came in eventually, but compared to today with all these $10,000 and $20,000 analytical computer programs, back then it was very rudimentary. Most of the time you spent was in the lab measuring prototypes and that sort of thing, as opposed to doing upfront computerized analysis before you even made something. I stayed at RCA for a time and then went to school nights and got an MBA degree from Northeastern University.

===Adding a Business Perspective===

'''Geselowitz:'''

What made you decide to do that?

'''Butler:'''

I was laid off at some point. It was the space program and the space race was winding down since at the time it was after they landed on the moon. There was a cutback and I got caught up in that cutback as one of the younger folks. I took the opportunity to go back to school. During that period before I got my MBA, I did go back to work with Raytheon nearby in Bedford, Massachusetts, and ended up staying at Raytheon for nine years working on again, exclusively military EMI issues. But at the time, after spending nine years at Raytheon, I ran the EMC group doing a lot of testing, analytical consulting et cetera.

It became frustrating for me, though, because in a large company you tend to be a number rather than an individual. You could do well, but if somebody at your same level didn't do well, everybody was treated the same. I wanted some individuality and I looked and I thought about the commercial world as being a little different. With the military, even as an engineer, it was somewhat of a union-like atmosphere. I decided to start looking around and I left Raytheon and went to GenRad, General Radio Company. There I became Head of Corporate Standards and did some EMI work for them for a number of years. That company fell on hard times and I was let go. At the time, all those many years, I had been recommending products from Chomerics, which is the company I now work for and have for the last 26 years. So, when I called them up, they invited me in the next day and hired me an hour after the interview. They started thinking that I'd really already been with them, recommending them for so many years, so they were delighted to have me and I've been there ever since.

===Getting Involved with the Local EMI Community===

'''Geselowitz:'''

Okay. Before we get on to your career there, let's step back again. When did you become aware that there actually was a society of individuals interested in EMI issues?

'''Butler:'''

After I got out of school with my masters and I began to work for RCA and then started to do the EMI work. I became aware of the publications in the industry and started reading about the symposia and the like. I'll be perfectly honest with you, I don't know at what point I said, gee I need to be part of this. I think I went to a symposium, and I think I went to a local chapter meeting. But at some point it became clear that if I was going to be in this business that's where they all met. If I wanted to learn more, become more networked, I needed to get more involved. I started to go to more chapter meetings, went to a couple of symposia and when I worked at GenRad I was involved. My mind's a little hazy as to exactly when I did it, but it became clear that if I enjoyed the field of EMI, I needed to go and be with that group and participate.

'''Geselowitz:'''

Was the Boston chapter very active?

'''Butler:'''

It was not. It was not 50 people; it was more 15 to 20 people a month at meetings. But, again, they had interesting speakers come through and I guess it was a group of core people you got to meet. So at that time I did get involved. At one point the Boston Chapter won the right to hold a symposium like this one. In 1985 they did host it—way back when—and I was the exhibits chair for that show. That was interesting because I then got to meet a lot more people from the companies that sell equipment in the area and made a larger number of contacts in the field because I was assigning the booths and listening to all their issues. Go forward 15 plus years, we had another symposium in Boston and I was the Vice Chair for the show as well.

'''Geselowitz:'''

Was that 1985 meeting when you first met the national IEEE EMC volunteers?

'''Butler:'''

Yes. To run a show like this they award the symposium to cities five years in advance. So there are many meetings over several years where the national people come through for the board meeting, for the tour of the facility to make sure it's okay. Then whoever is on the board at that time, it was W. E. “Gene” Cory then, who had to more or less approve the size and the logistics and whatever. Gene Cory is a longtime member who just passed away this past year. I remember him coming to visit us in Boston on multiple occasions to talk about what are you doing for this, what are you doing about a gala event, have you made provisions for this and that, and there was a lot of rubbing shoulders with some national people at that time. I think certainly that at that show I was hooked; I was in this for the long run.

===Participating in the National Level of the IEEE Electromagnetic Compatibility Society===

'''Geselowitz:'''

After the symposium what was your first national involvement with the society?

'''Butler:'''

When did I first get involved in the national? I think I started a little differently. I joined SAMA, the Scientific Apparatus Makers Association, and they had an EMC Committee, and they had some standards. They worried about security guards with walkie-talkies walking around power plants and setting off alarms and the like, and I worked on that committee on that standard, and then began to understand there were other committees with other EMC involvement. I believe I went to the SAE (Society of Automotive Engineers) AE4 Standard committee. AE 4 is a committee that's meeting here today, that worries about EMI in a lot of military systems. Then I found the EIA (Electronic Industries Alliance) had an EMC committee and I dropped into a couple of theirs. I started going to the symposiums on a regular basis and then as now, most of these ancillary EMC groups from SAE, EIA, RTCA (Radio Technical Commission for Aeronautics in) meet at this symposium every year because this is the center of the EMC universe. All these other organizations held their meetings here and since I was going to the symposium on a regular basis I started sitting in on all of them; automotive was here quite a number of years, and medical. I started signing up. I was fortunate in my position at GenRad and then when I went to Chomerics, that they allowed me to keep my finger in a lot of different standards activities that might affect their business. I think before I actually got involved at the international level with the IEEE I was involved in a lot of other peripheral groups involved in EMC, and only realized after a number of years that the center was the IEEE. When I joined the IEEE and started to get involved working my way up through the committees, I had had a lot of experience rubbing shoulders with EMC engineers.

'''Geselowitz:'''

Everyone knew you already even though you hadn't actually been active in IEEE.

'''Butler:'''

Let's face it, the EMC Society has 5,000 or so members, but to be elected to the Board of Directors you've got to know a lot people. If you just do your job and go to local chapters you're not going to get elected president. You really have to have some presence by getting involved in all of these different EMC committees and organizations and actually doing work saying, yeah, I'll write that or I'll draft this. I had some name recognition, and at the same time working for Chomerics early on I was traveling on the road 50% of the time doing EMC seminars. My company, at that time, was very big on teaching mechanical engineers about EMC, so I used to do three-hour seminars, as many as ten a week flitting from company to company . You do that for a year or so, coupled with the fact you've been working shoulder to shoulder with many other EMC engineers in different venues, by the time you want to run for president, you have a lot of name recognition. I was fortunate due to my work experience to be able to do that.

===Running for EMCS President===

'''Geselowitz:'''

What made you decide to run for president?

'''Butler:'''

I'd signed on early in some of the standards committees. I was in the Representative Advisory Committee, the Technical Advisory Committee. The way it works in the EMC Society is that you sign on to be on a committee, and as you do work and they realize they can count on you, they ask would you do this, and you continue to run. It's always the situation where you're running sometimes without an opponent, but you move up in the organization and after awhile you get into that level.

Then as you move up into the ranks into a VP status, there starts to become an invisible pecking order of how people might run for president, and you get in line and follow each person till they pass their two-year term. I got into this line of progression of people that I indicated I was in for the long-term, and sure enough there are not many head-to-head elections for president. There have been several, but not many. It's usually somebody who's been in working for the IEEE and the committee for ten plus years who have paid their dues and when they throw their hat into the ring everybody else steps back and says, okay it's not my turn. Eventually everybody who wants to, I think, becomes president because most of us are in it for 30, 40 years. There's only a two-year term as president, so I think you get into this ordered list of people, due to their tenure in the ranks.

'''Geselowitz:'''

In other words it's not tough if you really want to do it. If you're willing to do the work they'll elect you to the job.

'''Butler:'''

If you want to sign up for 20 years you could probably get to be president, but if you want to flit in and out for a year or two; not going to happen. It's more of a recognition that you have enough knowledge, personality and experience, you can do it, and they recognize you can do it, and you want to do it. You rise and they let you move forward, but you just don't flit in for a few years and attend meetings, never take any action items, never do anything; not going to happen. The people that become president of the EMC Society have paid their dues many times over. Most of them by that time have awards.

I was talking to one of the gentlemen, Bruce Archambeault, who is going to get the Cuming award for service to the society. He's still a member of the board. He's done more work than many, many people with awards and he's being given the award for long-term, lifetime service. He's been plugging at our society for 20 years and certainly he deserves it many times over. What you see more often than not is many people become president; they have a lot of awards that have been placed upon them long before they become president because they've been doing it for 20 years. That seems to be the formula if you want to get ahead.

You have to show, you have to have chaired committees; you have to have managed crises of standards, and getting people to agree, and essentially paid your dues. That's one of these things that I tell many people who want to get involved, because you went to the room and sit there and signed the attendance book you're not going to be recognized or they're going to forget who you are. If you raise your hand and say yeah, I'll do that and you do that many times over, and you keep doing it they'll, recognize you and you move up, but you have to get your hands dirty.

'''Geselowitz:'''

Because we're engineers?

'''Butler:'''

We're engineers! In 1986 when I joined Chomerics, I was in marketing. My job was technical marketing. I was an EMC engineer but I wasn't working on EMC stuff. Chomerics sells EMC products so I lived and breathed EMC every day but my title was marketing. In the world of marketing you tend to flit in and out of things and identify prospects, and then move on to the next. Not the case if you want to stay in the EMC Society. If you did that with the EMC Society you'd never move up in the organization. There's a commitment.

'''Geselowitz:'''

Now how common is that for someone on the marketing side to stay so involved in the technical society?

'''Butler:'''

I don't know of anybody else who has done it. It was a comment that was made to me by a couple of people. It was odd that somebody who worked in marketing would be able to stay in the senior administration and be president of the EMC Society. Most of the people, when I look around, are EMC consultants or they're in academia and they live, eat and breathe EMC every day of the week. I sometimes worry about tradeshows and the internet, and in advertising that's a little different bent, so I'm the only one that I know who've moved up so far whose actually in marketing. Even to this day I'm in marketing.

'''Geselowitz:'''

Chomerics encouraged you, though, to keep your involvement?

'''Butler:'''

Absolutely. They let me go anywhere and everywhere. During my two-year presidential tenure we were in meetings in Tokyo, Canada, Paris, Rome, Bruges in Belgium; nobody said boo. At that time 90% of the sales of Chomerics were for EMI reasons. They viewed it as an investment in institutional advertising. To have my name and the word Chomerics next to it and the IEEE name there as well has been very good.

(EMC Secretary) Janet O'Neil, recognizing that if somebody's going to give their time and the company's going to allow them and pay their way, you really got to give them a nod by at least listing who they work for next to their names. She's been very good at doing that in the newsletter. She made it clear every time I did something or went somewhere as Joe Butler of Chomerics. The company, when they saw that, viewed it, okay, this is institutional advertising, and we may be reviewed in a better light than perhaps our competitors. I think it worked in some cases because when they said Joe Butler's in the area with our salesman can we come and visit, all of a sudden the waters parted. They weren't going to talk to our salesman, but if I was in the area they would show me their lab. So, it worked.

'''Geselowitz:'''

It's interesting that other companies didn't catch on and leverage their employees in the same way.

'''Butler:'''

Well some did. Eventually some did. Mike Oliver, whose running the symposium this week, works for MAJR Products and he stepped up and did it. He did it the same way and Gary Fenical of Laird Technologies has done it as well. But I think I got involved in the IEEE long before they did. Also, they were involved in one or two committees. I was involved in a lot more with the IEEE. Most people didn't recognize it as the way to go. I'm surprised.

===Standards===

'''Geselowitz:'''

Very interesting. Before we get to the issues that faced the EMC Society when you were on the board and when you were president, you've mentioned standards a lot. I was wondering if want to say anything about the role of standards in EMC and the relationship between the EMC and the IEEE Standards Association. It seems to me that all IEEE Societies are involved in standards to some level, but at EMC it really seems to predominate.

'''Butler:'''

Yep, yep. It does. I think EMC is a real world problem. There are a lot of regulations, depending on the industry, that say you can't sell your product till you meet this published legislated law we made. The FCC or the FDA or the aeronautical or automotive, agency whatever it may be, draws some lines in the sand. You've got to set your up equipment, pass the test, and then they'll give you the label, and you can sell it. There's a need for standards to direct people how to do this, how do you meet these things, and how do you properly test it so you can get your ticket and go forward. It's a real problem. On the other side, sometimes it’s a matter of the device won't work. If it has an EMI problem it might not work so it’s a real world problem. It's not an artificial regulation or something. You really have to meet it, pass it, to go forward, so the need for standards on how to properly test it, how to properly solve the problem is real. I think in that sense there's a need for these standards to allow everybody to do it the right way, do it the same way, and so it's real.

'''Geselowitz:'''

What you just said about one right way is interesting. In a lot of industries you can just compete—look at Betamax versus VHS, one of the classic examples of technological competition in the marketplace. But what if you market a product that's interfering with other products? You can't do it.

'''Butler:'''

You can't do it. Right.

'''Geselowitz:'''

Everyone has to sit down at the table and say what are the EMC requirements?

'''Butler:'''

Right. Absolutely. You have to sit down and competitors have to sit side by side and talk about their experiences. When there's a standard and somebody says, okay, I propose we do the test this way; you've got two competitors, whether they be test labs or equipment suppliers, and they've got to run round-robin tests and exchange technical information. I'm sure their senior management rolls their eyes at the level of cooperation, but it's not going to work unless that's the way it is. I'll be honest with you, even though you see them as competitors, whether they be consultants or whatever, everybody is pretty cooperative with one another when it comes to trying to solve a technical problem. So, standards are very important in our business.

'''Geselowitz:'''

IEEE EMC is very effective in bringing standards to market?

'''Butler:'''

Absolutely. The IEEE has a very disciplined process for how they prepare the standard, the voting, the balloting groups, so there's no question when something becomes an IEEE standard that it is been properly vetted among the user groups, the general interests; no special interest group has rammed this through. It’s a very interesting, open process. For many of the other societies and professional groups that write EMC standards, it’s not so; they don't even send their standards outside of their little world. When the IEEE sits in a meeting and says, who or what other groups do we know might like this, and somebody says SAE or RTCA, they send the standard to the other group saying give us some comments. They actually solicit other groups to make sure they get all the comments they need.

I sit in these other groups and that standard doesn't leave the 15 or so people working on it. Even though it might be an approved standard with that group's imprimatur, it certainly didn't see the light of day anywhere else. The IEEE is much more open and very much on the offense in terms of including everybody to make sure they get as many comments as they as they can before they just arbitrarily create something. It's a much more rigorous process. So many people, I think, look at the way we do standards as the standard.

'''Geselowitz:'''

The gold standard?

'''Butler:'''

The gold standard of standards and the way it makes it all go; you get people like Don Heirman. He is the gold standard of standards. If you get people like him running the group and Andrew Drozd and Don Sweeney, and many others who have paid their dues and have spent their time, it's people like that whose attention to detail and relentless pursuit to make sure it's right. That's how it happens. If you didn't have those kinds of people it wouldn't work either. You can have the process but unless you have the people who sign up for it and believe in it, it won't happen either, so those are the kinds of people that make it tick; very important, the IEEE EMC Society.

===Core Issues during Tenure as VP and President===

'''Geselowitz:'''

Okay. When you started to move up to this higher echelon and my notes say that you became a VP first in 1998 of the EMC. What were the issues facing the group as an IEEE Society at that time?

'''Butler:'''

There were several: budget issues. At that time the IEEE was still floundering a bit with their finances and all the money was held by the technical societies. Among the societies, there was some “them” vs. “us” about the monies, and it went on for several years thereafter, but there was always budgeting issue as to how much reserves you had and how much you could grow. Our big event moneymaker is this symposium. There was always some issue; how much money did you make this year, and are you keeping up with your reserves, and that sort of thing, so dollars were definitely an issue.

Also, there was starting to be some emergence of globalization issues. There were other conferences running around the world that many people sought our technical support because they wanted to be able to use the IEEE logo on their literature to say hey, this is a technical cosponsored event, this is a highbrow event – again, the standard the IEEE has for technical papers and whatever is pretty rigorous, and if you could get a technical co-sponsorship from the EMC Society with reviewers from the EMC Society, that raised up the profile of what you were going to hear and see with regard to technical content. Many people around the world were vying for our approval on that regard and it was starting to work its way in. It continues to this day and I think that was something we were all interested in.

===Going Global===

'''Geselowitz:'''

What about trying to get engineers of those other places to join the IEEE EMC rather than just partnering on conferences? Was there an effort in that area?

'''Butler:'''

There was. There was a starting effort in that area. I think it started under my predecessor Dan Hoolihan and then continued with me – because before then we didn't really have focused membership development around the world. During my tenure Motohiso Kanda, of the University of Colorado, passed away. He was editor of the EMC Transactions and I had occasion to appoint Carlos Satori from Brazil to the Board of Directors, and we had just picked up Dr. Takeo Yoshino, who's still with us, in Japan, and they both started to focus on global recruitment around the world. I think in Dan's term continuing to mine, we actually started to turn around to these groups who were asking for our imprimatur and say, why don't you start a chapter where you are, and why don't you become one of us. It started then and then it took off.

I think my colleague from Israel, past president Elya Joffe, probably did the most with chapter development around the world. The origins of this starting to think about global chapters and pursuing it a little bit more started with Dan and started to flourish with me. Clearly the U.K. and even Japan had chapters way back when but not many more.

'''Geselowitz:'''

How about today? Would you say it's grown out to a global society?

'''Butler:'''

Oh, absolutely. Today it's a global society. As I look in past years Francesca Maradei was just our president from Italy, Elya was our president from Israel. We've had a couple of international EMC Symposiums so yes I would describe, even though it's North American centric, it's a global society. There's no question about it. I think we're better for it absolutely. I think we started to realize that these other pockets of high EMC activity – whether they be in the U.K. or France or Poland or Rome or Japan – really has helped us greatly.

===A Shift from a Military to a Commercial Focus===

'''Geselowitz:'''

Was that in a sense both a need to globalize and also an ability to globalize, and all impacted by a shift away from military dominance of EMC issues to, to commercial dominance? Am I reading that right?

'''Butler:'''

Yeah, I think you're probably right. I think you're right. That, and I think we realized that there was a lot more to the EMC world than just the United States, and as you start to see the number of papers coming in to our symposia and other symposia are growing and being highly global, we realized that there's a lot more to this than the U.S.

'''Geselowitz:'''

My point was when it’s the different militaries who are doing it they're not going to encourage or allow cooperation, but when these different groups in other countries, if someone in India's working on a commercial product then you want to be talking to them.

'''Butler:'''

Absolutely. No question about it. I think it certainly made it happen and then even today you've got all these companies that have their headquarters in the U.S., design center in the U.S. but it's not made here. Their EMC engineers are here and there, so there's a need for this global coordination, absolutely.

'''Geselowitz:'''

You've identified two major issues as IEEE finances and globalization. Anything else you remember from those years that is worth mentioning?

'''Butler:'''

Not really. I was going back reading the EMC newsletters from those years and I have them in my briefcase. We started to continue an expansion of globalization and recognition that we need to sit down with these other organizations. At that time it was the people from Poland at the Wroclaw Symposium, it was the Zurich EMC Symposium, there was a Rome EMC Symposium, there was one in St. Petersburg, Russia, there was one in Japan. The need was there to talk with the organizers who were the senior EMC people in that area and we all agreed, that we needed to talk more. And they did want our IEEE EMC Society endorsement, but we wanted their continued participation in discussions with us as well.

In reading back and thinking about all that now, I think those are the two major issues. To be honest I don't think that as you review and you listen to all of the presidents, I don't think you're going to see some big thing that I did during my tenure. I think I was more outgoing, friendly, professional; I didn't rock the boat. I didn't bang on the table, I didn't call anybody out. I think it was pretty much business as usual following some globalization trends, so I don't think I did anything outstanding. I didn't establish anything that wasn't there before, but I did keep things running smoothly.

'''Geselowitz:'''

In your experience as a member of the board, and then VP, president and past president, did anybody rock the boat or is it pretty much an even keel society? You had to deal with certain issues when IEEE came and said we're taking your reserves, there might have been a little table pounding but within the society, do you think pretty much people kept calm.

'''Butler:'''

Not everyone. No but I don't want to point any fingers or …[laughter]

'''Geselowitz:'''

…name any names?

'''Butler:'''

I know in my tenure when I was in the middle, was Dan Hoolihan before me and Todd Hubing after me, I'd like to think everything was continued. They started some initiatives as well but no, I don't think any of us rocked the boat. It's not like we offended the people in Europe or Asia or somebody by making some stupid statement. No, I don't think there was anything worthy of note. If you go back through the minutes of the meeting by Janet O'Neil, with her level of detail that she put in our meeting minutes, you can go back and read them, and I don't think you're going to find anything in my term that would stick out and say, oh my god, he did this during his two years. No, I don't think you're going to find that.

'''Geselowitz:'''

So, you were president in 2000-2001 and immediate past president in 2002-2003.

'''Butler:'''

Yep.

===Stepping Away===

'''Geselowitz:'''

How have you managed to stay involved since 2003?

'''Butler:'''

Actually, I dropped off. Having been involved in so many societies, all the while I was president I kept up my activities and EIA, SAE, RTCA, AIME. I was involved with four other societies so when my tenure ran out after having been involved, I decided I needed to step away, so I did. I have not been involved in any IEEE EMC groups since that time. I come every year to the symposium no matter where it is. My company doesn't exhibit here anymore because we've become more market-focused and we're going to military electronics show, automotive electronic shows, unmanned vehicle shows, medical shows where our salespeople can actually talk with people with EMI problems, and we walk away with 150 sales leads to sell our product. Here it tends to be the same group of senior EMC guys that come through every year. While it’s a great show to show you're in the business, you don't find many applications because these are the guys that you need to make sure they know who you are and will recommend you.

'''Geselowitz:'''

You were just saying that how you got started is recommending them and you must need to keep a little bit of a presence.

'''Butler:'''

Yeah, you do. We have a full-page ad in the program and I'm walking around with my logoed shirt all day, and I'm still keeping a presence, and I sit in the various meetings. I'm heading to a meeting today so I'm showing my involvement at the symposium but not during the year. During the year I'm not going to any meetings. I'm not working any documents, et cetera, so I have largely stayed out of the limelight, and unlike many of my colleagues, I have no interest in coming back. In the years since I departed there's been a trend where many people who have been on the board of directors then presidents have decided they want to get back involved and they have and the ones that have done it, I think have done a very good job.

But I'm a firm believer that you need change. Change is always good. No matter how good you do, there's somebody else who's going to build on what you did and raise it to the next level, and I firmly believe in that and this is helped by the required term limits. I have no interest in inserting myself back into that chain.

'''Geselowitz:'''

Are you still involved in any standards committees?

'''Butler:'''

No. No I've dropped out of all of them.

'''Geselowitz:'''

Does your company still send younger engineers?

'''Butler:'''

No, they don't. We backed away from all of that for different reasons, so my company doesn't. I've advocated it and once in awhile I do go to a standards meeting. It's interesting we do have EMC engineers other than I, but they're all in our test group. They all test products and the only way you get revenue is to test products, so you can't send an EMI guy to a standards committee meeting because he's not bringing in revenue. We have just enough people on our test group to generate and do the testing. There are no extra EMC guys in marketing.

I was in marketing, so I was free to travel for other reasons because as I attended IEEE meetings I would also visit customers so I could combine trips and make it useful for other things for the company. We don't have any other EMC engineers and not many companies do either. Big companies like mine and others that sell EMI products and stuff don't have senior EMC engineers on the payroll. A few do but you count the number of fingers of my hand.

===Research and Development===

'''Geselowitz:'''

Where does the research and development come from for future EMC products?

'''Butler:'''

We visit customers directly. We send our R & D guys to visit. We invite the EMC guy of the company and say, look we want to bring in our R & D guys. We wanted to hear what your problems are, what problems you have, what products can't you find; tell us you've looked at all the products, you've looked at ours, our competitors, what do you need. What does this thing need to be able to do, what specs, what temperature range? We actually do what they call a deep dive interview of the customer and take extensive notes on what they want. Then we come back and maybe partner with them and develop the product. We do involve the EMC guy but it's the EMC guy for that company and everything is under wraps, under secrecy agreement and then if we do something it may well be introduced to the marketplace, but it's not something we would bring in, throw around the table here at the symposium.

'''Geselowitz:'''

A big part of EMC is individualized consulting? Whether you're a small consulting firm in your own shop or a big company like Chomerics, you're customers have problems and you're working directly with the customers?

'''Butler:'''

Absolutely.

'''Geselowitz:'''

I guess any basic research that might be and is going on in the universities is what you're saying the companies are not doing the basic research; they're just doing direct development with customers.

'''Butler:'''

Some of the bigger companies that have bigger R & D departments do some but a lot of it’s being done in the universities. You only have to look at the papers in the symposium record for this show now and look at who they're from; most of them from the universities. So much of the work is going on in universities.

'''Geselowitz:'''

Yet, my understanding is that that EMC is not really taught at the undergraduate level in universities; rather, students wander into it professionally. There may be a graduate lab or the professors doing it, and those graduate students are into it, but otherwise it's not recognized as a field the way that signal processing is.

'''Butler:'''

Right. In the last umpteen years the EMC Society recognized that slightly before or after my term where we decided that we really ought to provide seed money to universities to have them start an EMC course. That's gone on for the many years and I can't quite remember whether it started during my tenure or Kimball Williams; probably under Kimball Williams but the EMC Society's been trying to foster that.

'''Geselowitz:'''

Has that been successful to some extent?

'''Butler:'''

I believe so, yeah. There are some laboratories, there are some universities. University of Missouri Rolla is probably the one that I recognize the most that has graduate-level EMC masters and doctoral courses, and Clemson now, with Todd Hubing, has something, so there are some graduate level places that you can get EMC, but undergraduate – not really. You can't go to school and college and say I want to be an EMC engineer.

The reason for that is it's so all encompassing – I mean its circuit design; and when you get into my business where we make EMI gaskets and conductive partitions and shielded windows; its chemistry – it's formulating elastomers, its formulating chemical compounds, formulating paints, so it's basic chemistry. Then when you throw in, what about if I'm near the ocean, you're talking about galvanic corrosion issues and metallurgy and what happens when one metal is against another in salt spray, and you throw in sulphur dioxide from stack gases, that's another issue. Now you're into advanced chemistry and metallurgy and the very basics. You buy a conductive EMI gasket from my company and you need to put it in the box. Somebody has to calculate the deformation of the cover and how much bolt spacing you need, and how to seal the bolts.

So it's mechanical engineering, electrical engineering, chemical engineering, chemistry, metallurgy, physics. The breadth of EMI is so wide there is nobody who knows it all. What you find is some people are good at signal integrity, some being good at board layout, somebody's good at testing – they have the testing standards down pat – others are good at equipment.

You go out on the floor and look at the people selling equipment, they're the experts. I'm an expert in EMI gasketing so many of my colleagues who are consultants call me and say, Joe I've got this problem, we think he needs a gasket, will you talk to him. Then they just pass them to me. I play 20 questions and we find the type of gasket he needs, tell him how it works, what it can and can't do, then they go back to the consultant and they continue on. I think everybody recognizes that everybody isn't an expert in everything. And then when you start throwing in nuclear EMP and lightning and electrostatic discharge, the specialties are just endless and there's no nobody who knows it all. Everybody has their own niche that they they're recognized for.

'''Geselowitz:'''

You talked before about the standards meetings, with competitors sitting down and cooperating to the level where the senior management are rolling their eyes. Do you think that part of it is, unlike other fields, the nature of EMC lends itself to the fact that no one can do it alone so you have to cooperate with your colleagues.

'''Butler:'''

Absolutely. There's no question about it. There's no question about it, yeah. When they're talking about measurements and what thing to include, you've got this knowledge you might have for what customers want, you've got to dump that into the equation or the standards are not going to come out the way they ought to be. There is definitely necessary collaboration and to that end with all these different facets of EMC, it’s very interesting when you sit in a room and talk about this, and you have this collection of people with various backgrounds. One guy’s an expert on automotive, one’s an expert on aircraft, one’s a medical guy, and have the views tossed onto the table when you're discussing something, it's like oh wow, I never would have thought of that, so it's an interesting scenario.

We're not all in the same business because you're sitting next to the guy from Raytheon building missiles, to the guy from Motorola building radios, to the guy from Chrysler with automotive issues, and the guy from the FDA worrying about medical device electromagnetic interference. When you sit in this forum it's kind of interesting that you can pull so many people from so many markets with so many technical specialties, yet we're all EMC people. It's very interesting.

Life is good in that when you work at a company like mine, for instance, where we sell shielding products to the masses, I can be looking at a tank one day and a radio the next, and a medical device the third, and that's always the latest stuff because you can't sell it till it meets the standard. So the companies are calling you saying hey, we think we need this in order to be able to go to market. You're in consultations with them and looking at things that haven't been shown to the rest of the world yet, so that's pretty neat too. We have a whole group of people who do nothing but sign nondisclosure agreements so we can talk about the latest stuff before it's on the market.

To that sense for me, somebody like myself who works for a company that sells components, I'm not working for the same company. I did that way back when with Raytheon and RCA, but with Chomerics now, besides being able to get involved in the standards arena with all these different things about EMI, I talk to actual customers who need product as well. To be able to tell them that yeah, I know what you're trying to meet, I know that standard and I can have a discussion. In many cases depending on who calls, I know more about the standards they're trying to meet than they do because I sat on the committee, so that's kind of interesting. It helps me and I think that's another reason why the company has allowed me to do what I do.

'''Geselowitz:'''

I think that pretty much covers your career and society activity.

'''Butler:'''

Yep.

'''Geselowitz:'''

Is there anything that you'd like to add for the record that you can think of that we didn't cover? In terms of either IEEE or EMC more generally?

'''Butler:'''

No, I don't think so. I think the continuing thrust of globalization of the IEEE and the EMC in particular, absolutely necessary. I think that there's still a tremendous amount of standards work going on here and in Europe with the IEC and that will have relevance to many people. I think it's a good field to go into with the economy dipping, and even in Massachusetts, where I'm from, we're waiting for jobs to come back. I come here and there's a lot of jobs for EMC engineers posted down there on the bulletin board. Apple computer for one is looking to fill several positions, and it’s like, wow, EMC engineers seem to be immune from this economic thing which is good.

And that has happened before. Just when you think the business is slowing down ,you see this EMC jobs, and once in awhile they decide to close the lab and outsource, but to come here and see so many jobs looking for EMC engineers across the country is very encouraging, so. I think I'm in the right field.

'''Geselowitz:'''

Great. I think you are too. Thank you very much.

'''Butler:'''

Thank you very much.

'''Geselowitz:'''

I really enjoyed interviewing you.

'''Butler:'''

Thank you.

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The IEEE Life Members Committee (LMC), a Joint Committee of IEEE and the IEEE Foundation, provides leadership in the identification of, and support to, the interests of Life members (including future Life members) in activities of IEEE. The Life Members Committee is also responsible for the administration of the Life Members Fund in support of activities that are of professional concern and interest to Life members.

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Narrative for IEEE Technology Tours

[[Media:IEEE Technical Tour Report-Panama Canal-Mar 2010.pdf|Report of the IEEE Life Member Committee sponsored IEEE Technical Tour of Panama in March 2010.]]

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Silvanus Thompson

2013-02-25T19:06:38Z

Tjeffres: /* Biography */

== Biography ==

[[Image:Thompson_s.jpg|thumb|right]]

(Associate 1897)

'''Honorary Member 1914'''

SILVANUS Phillips Thompson, noted physicist and electrical engineer of Great Britain, and celebrated as a teacher and writer on electricity and magnetism, was elected an Honorary Member of the Institute March 13, 1914. He was born at York, England, June 19, 1851. Upon graduation from London University in 1869, he took up the study of chemistry and physics at the Royal School of Mines, also studying at foreign universities. In 1875 he received the degree of B.S. from the University of London, and in 1878 that of Sc.D. from the same university. He became professor of experimental physics at Bristol University College in the latter year. Here he began a series of investigations covering a wide range of problems in physics and electricity, becoming an authority on the subject of dynamo-electric machines. In 1885 he became principal and professor of physics at the City and Guilds Technical College at Finsbury, London. At the time of his death June 13, 1916, he was principal and professor of electrical engineering at this college. He was a fellow of the Royal Society, and was a past-president of the Institution of Electrical Engineers, of Great Britain. Doctor Thompson had also made many contributions to the history of science and philosophy.

== Further Reading ==

[[Archives:Papers of Silvanus P. Thompson|Papers of Silvanus P. Thompson]]

{{DEFAULTSORT:Thompson}}

[[Category:IEEE]]
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Ambrose Swasey

2013-02-25T18:55:25Z

Tjeffres: /* Biography */

== Biography ==

[[Image:Swasey_A.jpg|thumb|right]]

'''Honorary Member 1928'''

'''John Fritz Medalist 1924'''

The devotion of Ambrose Swasey, famous manufacturer of precision instruments and mechanisms, to the engineering profession, is evidenced by his founding of the Engineering Foundation in 1914. Doctor Swasey has contributed gifts totaling $750,000 to the Foundation, research agency of the 4 national societies of civil, mining and metallurgical, mechanical, and electrical engineers. Doctor Swasey was born at Exeter, N. H., December 19, 1846. During the period 1869-80 he was with the Pratt and Whitney Company, Hartford, Conn., paying special attention to gearing. In 1880, he went into partnership with W. R. Warner (incorporated in 1900 as The Warner and Swasey Company) for the manufacture of machine tools and astronomical instruments. The firm was first established in Chicago, but soon was transferred to Cleveland, where it has since remained. Since the death of Mr. Warner, Doctor Swasey has been chairman of the board. Many remarkable telescopes have been built by this firm, and during the war it solved many important problems. In 1924, the John Fritz Gold Medal was awarded Doctor Swasey; he has also received the Franklin Medal, highest award of the Franklin Institute. In addition to honorary membership in the A.I.E.E., which was awarded him June 27, 1928, he is an honorary member of The American Society of Mechanical Engineers (president 1904), American Society of Civil Engineers, Institution of Mechanical Engineers (Great Britain), Institution of Mining Engineers (Great Britain), and the Society of Civil Engineers. He is a chevalier and officer of the French Legion of Honor, and has received several honorary degrees in the United States.

== Further Reading ==

[[Archives:Papers of Ambrose Swasey|Papers of Ambrose Swasey]]

{{DEFAULTSORT:Swasey}}

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Ondiscussionpage:Milestone-Proposal talk:High Temperature Superconductivity

2013-02-25T01:42:59Z

Ggcooke: Created page with "== Headline Goes Here == Initial Impressions and a few Constructive Comments Article Content Goes Here... I reviewed the existing Milestone - Discovery of Superconductivity, ..."

== Headline Goes Here == Initial Impressions and a few Constructive Comments

Article Content Goes Here...

I reviewed the existing Milestone - Discovery of Superconductivity, 1911 (Netherlands Section). I also googled many sites including Wikipedia. Generally I found your proposal worthwhile but hard to understand with so many temperature related numbers. But that is a minor problem. Personally, I found your proposal too much like the Milestone already awarded to the Netherlands Section. I didn't like the word "implications" and I was confused with names like YBACO, IBACO and TBCO. You can either rewrite the proposed citation entirely or take a different approach as follows:

1.Consider nominating the HTS Research Laboratory (Texas Center of Superconductivity) as the Milestone. The research / scientific work / discovery of materials with HTS properties, the subsequent development work performed in the lab (to be determined) leading to the discovery of a superconducting wire patented by Venkat Selvamanickam. To circumvent the 25 year rule on milestone, you can identify the research laboratory as the place where great work was relentlessly pursued. Venkat Selvamanickam's patents need not be mentioned. What do you think of nominating the entire lab as a milestone? How does the Texas Center ... compare with other labs in the US? Does it matter?

2. Consider nominating the work at the research lab leading to the fabrication of HT superconducting wire as a Milestone. Venkat S need not be mentioned by name. I think the licensing agreement between VS, University of Houston, and SuperPower makes a great Milestone. I googled with Phys/Org, SuperPower, and Venkat Selvamanickam.

Minor comment: there should be five references. I didn't count that many. Websites make good references.
Looking forward to working with you.