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Microwave Hall of Fame 
Part I

Updated July 5, 2011

Isn't about time that the word "Hall of Fame" gets applied to people that actually contributed something to society, rather than overpaid people that do nothing but sing or play ball? Here's an introduction to some of the innovators upon whose broad shoulders you stand when you work in the microwave industry: famous engineers, mathematicians and scientists that provided the foundations for the microwave industry.
If you want to nominate a Microwave God to this humble hall of fame, send info to Microwaves101.com and you will win a free pen knife if he (or perhaps she?) makes the cut. There is room for an unlimited number of inductees, so start shooting them in. No microwave managers please£¡
On this page, you'll find the classics--most of these guys you should know for their contributions to electrical engineering as a whole. History-makers around WWII have their own page, and modern-day geniuses now have a page to call their own. Check them all out£¡

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

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

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

 In 1873, country-boy misfit James Clerk Maxwell laid the foundations of modern electromagnetic theory in his work, "A Treatise on Electricity and Magnetism" in Scotland, which he wrote as a retired college professor. Born in 1831, and nicknamed "Dafty" by his childhood peers, Maxwell theorized that, if combined, electrical and magnetic energy would be able to travel through space in a wave. If Maxwell were here today, he would be pleased to see his equationsroutinely solved many thousands of times per second by today's three-dimensional structural simulators using finite element analysis. Dr. James C. Rautio, founder of Sonnet Software, Inc. (one of our sponsors£¡), seems to have made the study of Maxwell a personal quest. He's a Distinguished Lecturer of the IEEE for 2005, and his talk entitled The Life of James Clerk Maxwell, is not to be missed, animated with at times with different voice impressions of 19th century Scotsmen (div ye ken?) You can download a copy of an excellent public-domain biography of Maxwell, written in 1882 by his friend Lewis Campbell, thanks to James Rautio, who personally scanned it into a pdf. Its tucked up under "products" on the Sonnet web site. For those of you that don't read much, it has some great contemporary pictures£¡
 
 In June 1876, a U. S. patent was applied for:
"the method of, and apparatus for, transmitting vocal or other sounds telegraphically¡­ by causing electrical undulations, similar in form to the vibrations of the air accompanying the said vocal or other sound."
Three weeks later Alexander Graham Bell's famous sentence, "Watson, I want to see you", was spoken into the first telephone. The same month, Custer's army became human pincushions.
Bell was born a Scot in 1847 and came to the "New World" by way of Canada, later settling in Boston. His portfolio of inventions is second to none, but his life's work was mainly centered on helping the deaf. The term bel (and decibel) was named by Bell Labs scientists to honor him. Bell thought the phone was too great a distraction, and refused to permit one in his study£¡ Bell died in 1922.

By the 1880s, electrification of the world had begun, first for lighting, and just as important, for motors. In the United States, a huge rift developed between supporters of direct current systems (being deployed by Edison), and supporters of alternating current (to be deployed by Westinghouse). Eventually, Nikola Tesla proved to the world that alternating current and his polyphase system of generation, distribution and power delivery using the induction motor were the answer to long distance, reliable electrical distribution. New York City was wired with direct current for a time, and unreliable DC trolleys and their sparking commutators gave the Brooklyn Trolley Dodgers baseball team (today's L. A. Dodgers) their name. During this time period, "Wizard of Menlo Park" Thomas Edison performed despicable acts on neighborhood pets to show the dangers of alternating current, and eventually arranged for the first prisoner execution on August 6, 1890, using (of course) alternating current. Convicted killer William Kemmlertook eight minutes to die, even though the procedure had been tested on a horse the day before. To see the botched execution from the movie Green Mile, click here (fair warning, this is a truly ugly event). The late 1800s/early 1900s were certainly the most interesting of modern times for technology. You can read about this time period in bookssuch as Tesla, Man out of Time, by Margaret Cheney.


Charles Proteus Steinmetz in his cabin near Schenectady. Looks like the museum incorrectly painted the replica table white£¡
Steinmetz was a socialist, which is what brought him to the United States (he had to flee Germany after writing political essays). He was also an environmentalist, an anti-racist, a protagonist of electric cars to reduce pollution, and a big fan of cigars. He preferred to live in a camp near General Electric's Schenectady plant, using a canoe as his fair-weather office. He had 200 US patents.

 
 Charles Proteus Steinmetz (1865 - 1923) was a German-born mathematician measuring just four feet tall, but was giant of a technologist. For a time, he was the brains of the Edison Electric company. He realized the major benefit of alternating current over his boss's narrow-minded, DC approach, which is the ability to efficiently transform up and down in voltage so that power transmission could be performed at very high voltage at reduced loss. Edison was indeed a victim of his "not invented here" attitude. Through a merger orchestrated by railroad robber-baron J. P. Morgan between Edison Electric and Thomson Houston Electric Company of Lynn Massachusetts, Edison's name was removed from the combined company, General Electric. Although Tesla must be credited with inventing the induction motor which changed the world (due to its inherent, year-after-year reliability), Steinmetz was the first to provide a mathematical interpretation of how an electric motor worked, using the phasor concept. His work on hysteresis allowed motor designers to optimize motor efficiency without continuous tinkering with prototypes.
Edison might be spinning in his grave these days, as high-voltage DC transmission line haves made a comeback of sorts. Once the problem of up/down converting is solved (which is an expensive proposition), DC has two advantages over AC: lower peak voltage for the same power (less opportunities to arc), and the skin depth at DC is infinite. Every gram of copper in a DC transmission line is used to move power equally, this is not true for AC. Therefor DC has a loss advantage which can be appreciable for large diameter lines. Here's some info on HVDC power transmission lines.


 In 1884, British physicist John Henry Poynting (1852-1914) published his description of the Poynting Theorem, which describes the vector that bears his name. The Poynting vector determines the direction and magnitude of electromagnetic radiation, and gave rise to what is known as the Right Hand Rule to determine power flow. Today,metamaterials routinely demonstrate lefthandedness, yet still obey Poynting's Theorem, even though he probably could not have envisioned this development. Among his other accomplishments, Poynting wrote a physics text book that was in print for 50 years£¡
[img]http://www.microwaves101.com/encyclopedia/images/flags/de.gif[/img] Several years after Maxwell's famous treatise, German Heinrich Hertz (1857-1894) conducted experiments that proved Maxwell's theories were correct. Hertz began testing these theories by using a high-voltage spark discharge (a source rich in high-frequency harmonics) to excite a half-wave dipole antenna. A receive antenna consisted of an adjustable loop of wire with another spark gap. When both transmit and receive antennas were adjusted for the same resonant frequency, Hertz was able to demonstrate propagation of electromagnetic waves. And thanks to Philip, we now have Mr. Hertz's correct photo£¡

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

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[img]http://www.microwaves101.com/encyclopedia/images/Italy.gif[/img] Others soon built on Hertz's work. In 1894, 20 year old Guglielmo Marconibegan experiments in Italy sending a wireless signal using Morse code, at first for short distances, and ultimately thousands of miles. Marconi was the son of a wealthy Italian businessman and an Irish mother who was part of the Jameson family whose distilled products were (and are) well known. He had limited education and no formal training as engineer or scientist, just an idea that wireless communications would one day render the telegraph obsolete, and the wherewithal and family support to pursue his dream. Marconi brought together the "perfect storm" of engineering curiosity (notice we didn't say "scientific"), confidence, financing and ego that comes along once in a lifetime to rattle the establishment out of bed and change the world. His only equal today would be be Bill Gates.Marconi faced resistance, resentment and reprisals from many well-known scientists of the era, and almost lost his personal fortune. His high-tech startup of the '90s, The Wireless Telegraph & Signal Company (a U.K. company) was soon renamed Marconi's Wireless Telegraph Company. This business began by installing company-owned and operated wireless communications onto ships to communicate with huge installations on key coastlines, while the founder pursued ground communications across the Atlantic. It is ironic that Marconi's methods of trial and error for tuning his equipment would have taken much longer if not for access to transatlantic cables owned by the telegraph companies his technology would compete with. Marconi received the Nobel physics prize of 1909 for his work, shared with German Ferdinand Braun. By 1911, "Marconigrams" had helped capture a famous murderer and in 1912 enabled the rescue of Titanic survivors. Marconi was the first experimenter to notice that transmission during daylight hours was more prone to noise than at night, which was later explained by Heaviside as due to the "Marconisphere" (now known as the ionosphere). Approximately 350 civilian Marconi wireless operators were killed at sea during the first World War, as the wireless shed was a crucial target for maritime marauders. Although Marconi was the singular force behind long distance wireless communications, he admitted he didn't really know how it all worked. Some years later the scientific community discovered that Marconi's idea that longer wavelengths would travel farther around the globe was incorrect, and Marconi's amazing 300,000 watt steam-powered spark gap transmitters, building-sized capacitor banks and multi-mile antenna elements were unnecessary at higher frequencies (short waves). Marconi died in 1937, to learn more about his life and that of murderer Harvey Crippen, go to our book page and order Thunderstruck. Marconi's company has long since has been chopped up and digested into BAE and Ericsson among others.
[img]http://www.microwaves101.com/encyclopedia/images/flags/Brazil.jpg[/img] Father Landell de Moura is a little known pioneer of wireless transmission of voice. In 1900 he publicly demonstrated voice transmission while others were merely transmitting Morse code. In 1901 he received a patent in Brazil for "equipment for the purpose of phonetic transmissions through space, land and water elements at a distance with or without the use of wires". He then traveled to the United States where he was awarded three patents in 1904: the "Wave Transmitter" which is the precursor of today's radio transceiver, the "Wireless Telephone" and the "Wireless Telegraph". His sketches have survived, and his equipment has been duplicated in modern times to show he was on the right track. Read hisfascinating Wave Transmitter patent here. Nominated by Ricardo, an Electrical Engineering student at University of Campinas, Brazil, and fan of microwaves101.com£¡

[img]http://www.microwaves101.com/encyclopedia/images/history/de%20Moura.jpg[/img]

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[img]http://www.microwaves101.com/encyclopedia/images/flags/canada.gif[/img] Reginald Aubrey Fessenden, born in Canada in 1866, was a huge pioneer of wireless. He was the first inventor to demonstrate transmission ofvoice in December 1900 (Marconi thought that Morse Code was good enough for all communication needs), and his first transmission involved a weather report£¡ He was the first to think in terms of continuous wave (CW) transmissions instead of the pulsed spark-gap transmitters of the day. He built some clever high speed alternators to provide up to 200 kHz, 250 kW signals for transmission, before anyone had developed a useful oscillator. He also developed the theory of heterodyne detection, and coined the word. Did we mention that he invented 500 other things too? A rare combination of genius and entrepreneur, thanks to Brian, he is now in the Microwave Hall of Fame£¡
Brian wishes to point out that Fessenden, Tesla, Charles Steinmetz and Ernst Alexanderson all worked for Edison. Is the top genius the one who can make business out of the genius of others? How many similar genius¡¯s worked for Bill Gates and helped him make his billions and whom we will only hear about 100 years from now if ever?
[img]http://www.microwaves101.com/encyclopedia/images/flags/de.gif[/img] Karl Ferdinand Braun (1850-1918) worked on wireless telegraphy. His inventions include the first semiconductor, the point-contact diode used in "crystal" radios; before that receivers had to use something called a "coheror" to convert RF to baseband. He also invented the first cathode-ray tube to provide a visual display, the precursor to radar screens, oscilloscopes and video screens alike. Today the Ferdinand-Braun-Institut f¨¹r Höchstfrequenztechnik in Berlin carries out some great work in microwave technology, especially in flip-chip coplanar-waveguide MMICs. Braun shared the 1909 Nobel prize for physics with Marconi.

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[img]http://www.microwaves101.com/encyclopedia/images/Usa.gif[/img] Lee de Forrest (1873-1961) was a prolific inventor (180 patents) and is regarded as inventor of the three-terminal tube, which he called the audion. Many regard him as the father of radio. By adding the grid to Fleming's diode "valve", de Forest showed how to control the signal but did not achieve amplification with the audion. Later inventors, most notably Armstrong, built on de Forest's discoveries and radio soon became a rage; even non-electronics companies such as Radio Flyer cashed in on the name. De Forest disliked the word "wireless", and helped populate the new word "radio" which was derived from radiation. Many early radio inventors were pawns of giant industrial companies such as Westinghouse, AT&T and General Electric, and the fight over patent rights was fierce and discredited some of the best minds in the field. De Forest suffered as much as any, going through four marriages, but lived a long life and saw radio move from curiosity, to invaluable war and peacetime communication tool, to mass media outlet. Lee spent many good years in Hollywood, among other honors won an Oscar for developing a way to add sound to motion pictures. Late in life he became disillusioned with radio, as he was neither a fan of pop music nor advertising. Nominated by Brian£¡

[img]http://www.microwaves101.com/encyclopedia/images/history/de%20Forest.jpg[/img]
Lee de Forest

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[img]http://www.microwaves101.com/encyclopedia/images/flags/union_jack.jpg[/img] Mad scientist Oliver Heaviside's research in transmission-line theory was first applied to telegraphs, including the transatlantic cable, but microwave engineers use his concepts to this day. A mathematician, he rewrote Maxwell's messy equations into their simple, vector-calculus form. He predicted the E-layer of the ionosphere, which allows propagation of electromagnetic waves around the curvature of the earth. A trendsetter years ahead of Ed Wood, he painted his nails pink£¡
[img]http://www.microwaves101.com/encyclopedia/images/flags/belgium.jpg[/img] [img]http://www.microwaves101.com/encyclopedia/images/Usa.gif[/img] Leo Hendrik Baekeland was born in Ghent, Belgium on November 14, 1863 to poor parents, yet earned his doctorate at University of Ghent by the age of 21. He emigrated to the U.S in 1889, and made his original fortune selling a process for photographic paper to George Eastman for $1,000,00 in the 1890s. Later experimentation by Baekeland resulted in discovery of the very first plastic, a thermoset compound created from formaldehyde and phenol that became known as Bakelite. Bakelite was a huge enabler for bringing radio to the masses, not just as a substrate for mounting electrical components due to its insulating property, but also as the material for mass producing cabinets. Click this link to go to the radio museum and notice the progression from hand crafted wood cabinet to molded enclosure during the 1930s. There's at least one Bakelite museum£¡ Baekeland died in 1944, we can't help but wonder what his coffin was made of£¡

[img]http://www.microwaves101.com/encyclopedia/images/history/baekeland.jpg[/img]

[img]http://www.microwaves101.com/encyclopedia/images/flags/serbia.jpg[/img] [img]http://www.microwaves101.com/encyclopedia/images/Usa.gif[/img] Although Marconi was awarded the Nobel prize in 1909 for his "wireless telegraphy" work , the U.S. Supreme Court revoked Marconi's patents since Serbian-American genius Nikola Tesla had taken out a patent for radio communications as early as 1897. Doesn't Tesla look smug in this picture? Tesla's life has taken on legendary status, having obtained more than 700 U.S. patents. Perhaps because he was jerked around by Thomas Edison to the tune of $50,000 early in his career, we can thank Tesla for perfecting alternating-current power distribution and fluorescent lights. Some of his other inventions include a unique steam turbine, liquefaction of nitrogen, and the awesome Tesla coils from which he coaxed 10,000,000 volts to light up the Colorado sky. No other inventor has has more articles written about him. Nikola Tesla is quite possibly the greatest engineer that ever lived; you can quote the Unknown Editor on that. You can find over 100 articles with "Tesla" in the title on the IEEE web site. Here's a second web site with info on Tesla that we found useful.
Watch David Bowie play Tesla in the movie The Prestige£¡

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[img]http://www.microwaves101.com/encyclopedia/images/flags/union_jack.jpg[/img] By 1894, Sir Oliver George was conducting experiments noting that directional radiation was obtained when he surrounded a spark oscillator with a metal tube. In 1897, Lord Rayleigh (John William Strutt) proved mathematically that waves could be propagated inside a hollow metal tube. Rayleigh also noted the infinite set of modes of the TE or TM type which were possible, and the existence of a cutoff frequency. Waveguide was essentially forgotten, however, until it was rediscovered independently in 1936 by George C. Southworth at AT&T (Bell Telephone Labs) and W.L. Barrow at MIT.

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[img]http://www.microwaves101.com/encyclopedia/images/Usa.gif[/img] A lot was happening in microwaves around the previous turn of the century. J.A. Fleming, who had worked with Maxwell, Marconi, and Thomas Edison, invented an "electrical valve", better known today as a diode tube (and those wacky Brits still refer to tubes as valves£¡) Fleming also came up with an equation that expressed the impedance characteristics of high frequency transmission lines in terms of measurable effects of electromagnetic waves.Up until this point, focus had been on sending and receiving communication signals. As the new century progressed, scientists worked with longer and longer wavelengths to achieve greater and greater distances.
[img]http://www.microwaves101.com/encyclopedia/images/India.gif[/img] In India, however, J.C. Bose was working with shorter and shorter waves. In 1895 Bose gave his first public demonstration of electromagnetic waves, using them to ring a bell remotely and to explode some gunpowder. The wavelengths he used ranged from 2.5 cm to 5 mm. Think about that. He was playing at 60 GHz over one hundred years ago£¡ Bose's investigations included measurement of refractive index of a variety of substances. He also made dielectric lenses, oscillators, receivers, and his own "polarization device."

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[img]http://www.microwaves101.com/encyclopedia/images/netherlands.gif[/img] In 1911, only three years after building the first helium liquifier, Heike Kamerlingh-Onnes discovered that mercury loses its electrical resistance entirely when cooled below 4.2 K in a liquid helium bath. Why do we include the discoverer or superconductivity in the microwave hall of fame? Stick around, the best in microwaves is yet to come with the advent of high-temperature superconductors£¡
[img]http://www.microwaves101.com/encyclopedia/images/poland.gif[/img] A scientist from Kcynia Poland, Jan Czochralski, was many years ahead of his time. In 1916 he developed a method for growing single crystals, which was basically forgotten until after World War II. Today the semiconductor industry depends on the Czochralski method for manufacturing billions of dollars worth of semiconductor materials. He was accused of being a Nazi sympathizer but was later acquitted and died in Poland in 1953. What a wacky world, Bill Gates is the richest man on earth and most people don't even know how to pronounce "Czochralski£¡"

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[img]http://www.microwaves101.com/encyclopedia/images/flags/de.gif[/img] Walter Schottky's name is embedded in solid-state physics (Schottky effect, Schottky barrier, Schottky contact, Schottky diode). Born in 1878 in Germany, he was a contemporary of Einstein and Max Planck. His work included superheterodyne receivers, noise theory, and radio tube work such as invention of the tetrode, but his most important contribution to microwaves is no doubt his investigation of metal-semiconductor rectifying junctions (published in 1938), which is the basis for the gate contact of all MESFETs. He died in 1976, one year ahead of Elvis.[img]http://www.microwaves101.com/encyclopedia/images/flags/sweden.jpg[/img] [img]http://www.microwaves101.com/encyclopedia/images/Usa.gif[/img] Harry Nyquist was born in Sweden in 1889, and emigrated to the U.S. when he was 18 years old. First schooled at University of North Dakota (uff-da£¡) and later earning a Ph.D. from Yale, he settled in to a long career at ATT and later Bell Labs. Nyquist's 1928 paper Certain topics in Telegraph Transmission Theory nails down a fundamental law of telecommunications: the highest frequency that can be accurately sampled is one half the sampling frequency (theNyquist Frequency). His other most notable contribution to electronics is the Nyquist Stability Theorem (1932), which determines when a feedback amplifier will and won't be stable. He also contributed to noise theory, the fax machine, and television, earning 138 patents and several major awards (as if the Microwaves101 Hall of Fame wasn't enough£¡) Nyquist died in 1976. Thanks to Zach at LockMart£¡

[img]http://www.microwaves101.com/encyclopedia/images/history/nyquist.jpg[/img]

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[img]http://www.microwaves101.com/encyclopedia/images/Usa.gif[/img] While still in high school, Edwin Howard Armstrong erected a 125 foot radio mast at his parents' house in Yonkers, New York, to receive the weak radio signals of the day. While still in college in 1912, he invented a feedback circuit based on Lee DeForest's three-terminal audion tube that provided the first usable electrical amplifier. Think about this: before Armstrong, the only "amplifiers" that existed were the mechanical relays used to boost voltage on long telegraph lines£¡ Armstrong won the triple crown of electrical engineering, soon inventing the superheterodyne receiver, then inventing frequency-modulation (FM) broadcasting. He cashed in on his patents, in spite of a corporate war between AT&T and RCA over who really invented the feedback amplifier, Armstrong or DeForest, but he spent more time in court than Perry Mason. On January 31, 1954 he committed suicide by leaping from a building; an ironic end to a brilliant man who often scared his co-workers by fearlessly scaling antenna installations. Dirtbag lawyers and corporate greed aside, the IRE (predecessor of IEEE) gave credit to Armstrong for the key inventions of radio. Nominated to the Hall of Fame by OAH of Towaco NJ£¡ Read Empire of the Air by Tom Lewis for more info on the history of radio.
As radio applications grew more sophisticated (and popular), stations started broadcasting regular commercial programs. By 1920, the US Department of Commerce stepped in and began issuing radio licenses, and in 1921 formally declared a special service category (and corresponding transmission wavelength) for commercial stations.

Microwave Hall of Fame 
Part II

Updated July 8, 2011

The field of microwave engineering contributed a lot to the efforts of both sides (all sides?) during World War II. Building on the work done earlier in the century, engineers developed microwaves theories and techniques for military and commercial applications that are still in use today. And they didn't have computers£¡
[img]http://www.microwaves101.com/encyclopedia/images/Usa.gif[/img] Also at Bell Telephone Labs in the 1930s, Dr. George C. Southworth discovered that radio waves could be transmitted efficiently through a hollow, water-filled copper pipe. He must have been a frustrated plumber. He and his team at Bell found that electromagnetic energy traveling through an enclosed structure moved in distinct patterns that we all know and love called "modes", and that the optimum diameter for a waveguide pipe was slightly greater than one-half wave length. They also experimented successfully with square, rectangular and oval waveguides.
[img]http://www.microwaves101.com/encyclopedia/images/history/Phillip_Smith_small.jpg[/img]
[img]http://www.microwaves101.com/encyclopedia/images/Usa.gif[/img] By the end of the thirties, secret work was afoot in both the USA and the United Kingdom. At Bell Telephone's Radio Research Lab in New Jersey,Phillip Hagar Smith, born in Lexington Massachusetts, developed a circular chart form in 1939 that shows the entire universe of complex impedances in one convenient circle. Wait, that's not entirely correct, as pointed out thanks to Jim... the Smith Chart only shows one half of the entire universe of complex impedances. The negative impedances (with a negative real part; where gain lives) still reach out to infinity in all directions around the circle. The Smith chart remains in wide use today, and will be around long after we're all gone. Les Besser recalls that Philip Smith submitted an article on his development to the IRE, which was rejected. The picture of handsome Phil is courtesy of his wife Anita, and just might be the only picture of him you could find on the entire worldwide web£¡ By the way, Anita's company, Analog Instruments of New Providence, NJ, still supplies the ubiquitous chart in paper form to the microwave industry.
Paul shared this story about following in the footsteps of Phil Smith. As a starting engineer he took over the desk and chair of Phillip Smith when Smith retired from Bell Labs in 1970. To welcome me, my colleagues decorated the desktop with a Plexiglas-covered, poster-sized Smith Chart which served as a humbling reminder that I was occupying a pretty special place.
[img]http://www.microwaves101.com/encyclopedia/images/Usa.gif[/img] William Doherty worked for Western Electric's Bell Laboratories in the development of high-power transmitters for transoceanic broadcasting when he invented the "Doherty Amplifier". His development of a method for greatly improving the efficiency of RF power amplifiers makes his name familiar in the RF industry today. Doherty was awarded the Morris Liebmann award by the Institute of Radio Engineers in May 1937 for his idea. He was still twenty nine years young£¡ His invention was quickly brought to market by a devoted team of Western Electric engineers. By 1940 Western Electric had incorporated the Doherty concept in 35 commercial radio stations worldwide, at powers up to 50 kilowatts. This concept has been exploited many times by microwave designers in the last twenty years, including MMIC representations; the 2004 IEEE Microwave Symposium lists about 10 papers with "Doherty" in the title£¡ We are still waiting for Bill's daughter to dig up a better picture of her famous Dad to replace the one on the right...
[img]http://www.microwaves101.com/encyclopedia/images/doherty.jpg[/img][img]http://www.microwaves101.com/encyclopedia/images/history/Woodyard%20(Lower%20Right).jpg[/img]

1939 photo of kystron pioneers.

Standing, left to right are Sigurd Varian, David Webster and William Hansen. In front are Russell Varian and John Woodyard

[img]http://www.microwaves101.com/encyclopedia/images/Usa.gif[/img] John Robert Woodyard was born in West Virginia 1904. He began as many did in the early decades of the 20th century; he tinkered with radio, cars and electricity. He worked as a radio operator on cannery ships in the Alaska fishing industry. Later, he decided to formalise his education and studied at University of Washington. He went on to Stanford University for his Ph. D; his thesis was on the Doherty grid-modulated amplifier with Frederick Terman. The Terman-Woodyard amplifier (a relative of the Doherty amplifier) was the result.Although several others carried the idea forward, it was John Woodyard who had the initial idea for "slabline" used in the HP 809 slotted line.
Up to and during WWII he worked with the Varian brothers as a key player in development of the klystron. After WWII his work was more in physics than in microwaves. He was a major contributor to the Berkeley Laboratory/Stanford Linear Accelerator. Woodyard died in 1981. Contributed by Kerry£¡
[img]http://www.microwaves101.com/encyclopedia/images/Usa.gif[/img] William Webster (Bill) Hansen (1909 - 1949)
Bill Hansen invented the electromagnetic resonant cavity which is the basis of several microwave devices (including the klystron).
He entered Stanford University at the age of 16; Russell Varian was also at Stanford and the two became lifelong friends.
Hansen joined the faculty at Stanford in 1934. In the late 1930s he worked with the Varian brothers, John Woodyard and others to develop the klystron. Of the origins of the klystron, Russell Varian said "among other ideas, Dr. Hansen proposed the use of a concentric line resonator for generating high voltages. Hansen and I discussed this possibility at considerable length and considered what form of concentric line would have the maximum efficiency."
In 1941 Hansen and his research group moved to the plant of the Sperry Gyroscope Company in Garden City, N.Y., contributing to developments on Doppler radar, aircraft blind-landing systems, electron acceleration and nuclear magnetic resonance. During World War II he worked in New York on defense applications of physics and electronics, including radar. Hansen was also a scientific consultant on the Manhattan Project during the World War II.
Bill Hansen died at age 39 from lung disease caused by beryllium from the devices with which he worked. Also contributed by Kerry£¡
[img]http://www.microwaves101.com/encyclopedia/images/history/Hansen.jpg[/img]

[img]http://www.microwaves101.com/encyclopedia/images/history/Terman.jpg[/img]

[img]http://www.microwaves101.com/encyclopedia/images/Usa.gif[/img] Frederick Emmons Terman (1900 - 1982) Fred Terman had an early interest in the then-novel field of wireless; he built his own receivers and transmitters in his teenage years and later became a well-known radio amateur. He studied for his undergraduate degree in chemistry and master's degree in electrical engineering at Stanford University before finishing his Ph.D. at MIT in 1924. It was at MIT that he learned a "business" approach to education and engineering.
After MIT Terman joined the Stanford faculty and taught electrical engineering. He convinced the authorities that there was a future in radio and electronics and so began the many years of education and research that made Stanford a world leader in that field.
In 1932 Terman published the seminal textbook, Radio Engineering; it became a standard reference. In 1943 he published the Radio Engineer's Handbook which, like its predecessor, also became a standard. From 1942 to 1945, he directed 800 staff at the Harvard University Radio Research Laboratory in research and development of radar countermeasures. He returned to Stanford as Dean of Engineering after WWII and never left again; he was Provost & Vice-President on his retirement in 1965. Terman was a great leader and many of his students went on to play key roles in the development of Silicon Valley. Two such were Bill Hewlett and Dave Packard; Terman was instrumental in helping them set up the famous Palo Alto garage. Another contribution by Kerry£¡
[img]http://www.microwaves101.com/encyclopedia/images/Usa.gif[/img] At the Battle of Britain in 1940 the British were able to detect enemy aircraft at any time of day and in any weather conditions, proving the value of microwaves to the world. The Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) opened the Radiation Laboratory to research applications for radar early in the 1940s. But back in England, the British needed help.
[img]http://www.microwaves101.com/encyclopedia/images/flags/union_jack.jpg[/img] Two British scientists, Henry Albert Howard Boot (June 2011: we have his complete name thanks to his son£¡) and John T. Randall at the University of Birmingham had devised a valve (the Limey word for "tube") which could generate 1000 times the power of any other existing microwave generator at the time. They named it the "cavity magnetron" (see Albert Hull). The problem was that it took them a month to create a dozen of the complex units. Watson-Watt suggested they talk to MIT, and MIT in turn suggested that the British meet with a small company called Raytheon, which had been founded by an ex-MIT professor, Vannevar Bush.
According to the book The Creative Ordeal, by Otto J. Scott, "Vannevar" rhymes with "Beaver". Not so£¡ We recently talked to Norman Krim, curator of Raytheon's historic archive, and he knew Mr. Bush personally, having been hired by Raytheon in 1935. Otto Scott was a contract writer, an outsider to Raytheon. The correct pronunciation is "VAN-uh-var". Happy 94rd birthday, Norm£¡

Microwave Hall of Fame 
Part III

Updated June 21, 2011

In the second half of the twentieth century, microwave innovators kept busy inventing. If you've been involved in microwaves for a few years, you might have had lunch with some of these people£¡
[img]http://www.microwaves101.com/encyclopedia/images/flags/germany.jpg[/img] [img]http://www.microwaves101.com/encyclopedia/images/Usa.gif[/img] In 1964 Bell Labs researchers Arno Allan Penzias (born 1933 in Munich) and Robert Woodrow Wilson (born 1936 in Texas) detected thecosmic microwave background of the Big Bang. You are free to believe anything you want about the age of the universe, but this discovery proved that it is 15 billion years old; cosmology is a scientific discipline. Penzias' family fled Germany in the 1930s, and he earned his doctorate at Columbia University in New York, while Wilson did his graduate work at Cal Tech. Penzias and Wilson shared the 1978 Nobel prize in Physics with a third researcher who did unrelated work. Read more about their discovery here. Penzias and Wilson were nominated by Carlos, muchas gracias£¡

[img]http://www.microwaves101.com/encyclopedia/images/history/penzias_and_wilson.jpg[/img]
Wilson (left) and Penzias

[img]http://www.microwaves101.com/encyclopedia/images/history/matthaei.jpg[/img]
George Matthaei

[img]http://www.microwaves101.com/encyclopedia/images/Usa.gif[/img] [img]http://www.microwaves101.com/encyclopedia/images/flags/austria.jpg[/img] In 1964, George Matthaei, Leo Young, and EMT Jones published a 4.5 lbs. (2 kg) book calledMicrowave Filters, Impedance-Matching Networks, and Coupling Structures. Most often referred to as simply "Matthaei, Young and Jones" or even "MYJ", the book is also known as the "Black Bible" because its original cover was black. The best filter designers still refer to this masterpiece, more than four decades later. Look for it in our book page£¡These three researchers worked together at Stanford Research Institute in Menlo Park, California, when the book was written and published by McGraw Hill. Seymour Cohnwas also a major contributor to this effort. Dr. Leo Young was born in Austria but came to America to get his Ph.D. at JHU. Matthaei and Jones were both born in the USA. Dr. Matthaei (rhymes with pat¨¦) served in the military in WWII, then earned his Ph.D. from Stanford, and later spent the better part of three decades as a Professor at UC Santa Barbara teaching and doing research. Thanks to Richard the lawyer and former microwave guy, with further inputs from Shashank£¡We are sad to report that Leo Young died September 14, 2006, click here to view his obit.
Coming soon... what does EMT Jones' initials stand for?
[img]http://www.microwaves101.com/encyclopedia/images/Japan_1.jpg[/img] Dr. Kaneyuki Kurokawa was born in Japan in 1928. While on leave of absence from from his position at University of Tokyo, he worked during the early 1960s at Bell Labs in New Jersey. His March 1965 IEEE paper entitledPower Waves and the Scattering Matrix, makes Kurokawa the first to popularize the concept of S-parameters. This profound yet simple idea is one of the concepts that sets microwave engineers apart from other "normal" electrical engineers. Note: we have found references to S-parameters in microwave engineering as far back as 1957, by Collin, Bolinder and others, but these earlier authors casually mentioned the scattering matrix and did not follow up with the analysis and depth of understanding that Kurokawa provided. Thanks for the tip, Ingemar£¡

[img]http://www.microwaves101.com/encyclopedia/images/history/kurokawa.jpg[/img]

[img]http://www.microwaves101.com/encyclopedia/images/Usa.gif[/img] Julius Lange invented the microstrip interdigitated quadrature coupler at Texas Instruments in 1969. The name "Lange" is probably second only to "Smith" in terms of its widespread usage in the microwave community. Please visit our page on Lange couplers, which is just getting started£¡ He got the idea for the famous coupler from the interdigitated emitter/base junction of a power transistor, thus making the proverbial lemon into lemonade. He holds ten patents on microwave components and subsystems. Dr. Lange turned 72 on December 14, 2006, and we wish him many happy more£¡
[img]http://www.microwaves101.com/encyclopedia/images/history/J.Langepicture.gif[/img]come from (Herb K. was nominated by Prof. X. of U of A£¡)
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http://www.microwaves101.com

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