John R. Pierce

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John R. Pierce : biography

March 27, 1910 – April 2, 2002

John Robinson Pierce (March 27, 1910 – April 2, 2002), was an American engineer and author. He worked extensively in the fields of radio communication, microwave technology, computer music, psychoacoustics, and science fiction. Born in Des Moines, Iowa, he earned his PhD from Caltech, and died in Palo Alto, California from complications of Parkinson’s Disease.

At Bell Labs

Pierce wrote on electronics and information theory, and developed jointly the concept of Pulse code modulation (PCM) with his Bell Labs colleagues Barney Oliver and Claude Shannon. He supervised the Bell Labs team which built the first transistor, and at the request of one of them, Walter Brattain, coined the term transistor; he recalled:

Pierce’s early work at Bell Labs was on vacuum tubes of all sorts. During World War II he discovered the work of Rudolf Kompfner in a British radar lab, where he had invented the traveling-wave tube;Kompfner, Rudolf, The Invention of the Traveling-Wave Tube, San Francisco Press, 1964. Pierce worked out the math for this broadband amplifier device, and wrote a book about it, after hiring Kompfner for Bell Labs.J. R. Pierce, Traveling-Wave Tubes, New York: van Nostrand Co., 1950 He later recounted that "Rudy Kompfner invented the traveling-wave tube, but I discovered it." According to Kompfner’s book, the statement "Rudi invented the traveling-wave tube, and John discovered it" was due to Dr. Eugene G. Fubini, quoted in The New Yorker "Profile" on Pierce, September 21, 1963.

Pierce is widely credited for saying "Nature abhors a vacuum tube", but Pierce attributed that quip to Myron Glass . OthersFrederick Seitz, Norman G Einspruch, Electronic Genie: The Tangled History of Silicon, Univ. of Illinois, 1998 say that quip was "commonly heard at the Bell Laboratories prior to the invention of the transistor."

Other famous Pierce quips are "Funding artificial intelligence is real stupidity", "I thought of it the first time I saw it", and "After growing wildly for years, the field of computing appears to be reaching its infancy."

The National Inventors Hall of Fame has honored Bernard M. Oliver

and Claude Shannon

as the inventors of PCM,

as described in ‘Communication System Employing Pulse Code Modulation,’ filed in 1946 and 1952, granted in 1956. Another patent by the same title was filed by John Pierce in 1945, and issued in 1948: . The three of them published "The Philosophy of PCM" in 1948.

Pierce did significant research into satellites, including an important leadership role (as executive director of Bell’s Research-Communications Principles Division

in the development of the first commercial communications satellite, Telstar 1.

In fact, although Arthur C. Clarke was the first to propose geostationary communications satellites, Pierce seems to have arrived at the idea independently and may have been the first to discuss unmanned communications satellites. Clarke himself characterized Pierce as "one of the two fathers of the communications satellite" (along with Harold Rosen)."John Robinson Pierce," Arthur C. Clarke, Locus, May 2002, p.69 See (reprinted from SMEC Vintage Electrics Volume 2 #1) for some details on his original contributions.

Personal life

Besides his technical books, Pierce wrote science fiction under the pseudonym J.J. Coupling. John Pierce also had an early interest in gliding and assisted in the development of the Long Beach Glider Club in Los Angeles, one of the earliest glider clubs in the United States.

Pierce had been a resident of Berkeley Heights, New Jersey, Pasadena, California, and later of Palo Alto, California.Kamin, Arthur Z. , The New York Times, October 23, 1994. Accessed July 6, 2008. "The recipient in 1979 was Dr. John R. Pierce, then of the California Institute of Technology who had been with AT&T Bell Laboratories at Murray Hill and at Holmdel. Dr. Pierce had lived in Berkeley Heights and now lives in Palo Alto, Calif." At his death Pierce was survived by his wife; a son, science fiction editor John Jeremy Pierce; and a daughter, Elizabeth Anne Pierce.