Harold Henry Beverage

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Harold Henry Beverage (born October 14, 1893 in North Haven , Maine , † January 27, 1993 in Port Jefferson , New York ) was an American electrical engineer. He is known as a pioneer of radio technology, above all for his contribution to the development of "trans-oceanic communication" at General Electric (GE) and the Radio Corporation of America (RCA) and for the beverage antenna named after him , a long-wire antenna that was initially used as a directional antenna for radio communications on long wave .

life and career

Beverage was born on a farm on North Haven, an island off the coast of Maine that at the time was only connected to the mainland by ferry to Rockland, about 14 miles away . He received his first training in the island's small one-room school. From 1907, however, he was already working as a technical assistant for a telephone company and repaired telephones on the island. After finishing school, he studied electrical engineering at the University of Maine at Orono .

He began to be interested in the still young radio technology early on and built his own amateur radio station. A popping spark transmitter with a receiver that enabled him to follow a daily radio messaging service for ships from Boston . On the evening of their collision with an iceberg in April 1912, Beverage claims to have received some radio messages from the RMS Titanic by chance . The next morning he overheard the radio traffic between the ships that had rushed to the rescue, especially from the RMS Carpathia , which took survivors on board after the sinking of the Titanic .

After graduating with a Bachelor of Science (B.Sc.) degree in 1915, he worked at General Electric . As a young professional he initially worked for one year in the test field in Schenectady , New York. After successfully completing the internal training program for engineers at GE, he switched to the team of radio pioneer Ernst Fredrik Werner Alexanderson as a radio laboratory assistant . A task he was collecting data in experiments with a so-called system Barrage (ger .: Barrage system ) entrusted, should be the prevents it from the Germans during the course of World War I might manage to paralyze the Allied radio traffic by jammers. Beverage was therefore temporarily active at the United States Navy's Alexanderson Alternator in New Brunswick , New Jersey . In the event that the cable connections to Europe were to be interrupted, this transmitter would have been the most important, probably the only facility with which the ongoing communication between the high command in Washington and the American troops in France could be maintained.

In 1919 he and John H. Payne operated an experimental radio system installed by GE at the request of the US Navy on board the USS George Washington . The ship was used to bring Woodrow Wilson , the President of the United States , to the Paris Peace Conference and back after the war . In addition to the experiments carried out on this occasion, the President was able to communicate with the office of Franklin D. Roosevelt , at that time Assistant Secretary of the Navy , in the capital Washington, DC not only in Morse code , but also over while driving across the Atlantic Exchange radiotelephony. A planned direct broadcast of his speech on Independence Day on July 4th on the return journey, some 200 miles off the American coast, failed for organizational reasons. The president's advisors had insisted on hiding the microphone under a flag so as not to make the president nervous. Wilson was not available to Beverage or the captain of the ship in advance to clarify where exactly on the ship he was going to give his speech. When he began to speak in front of the soldiers on board, he was about six meters away from the microphone and practically not audible over the radio. Then someone from the team read the transcript in the radio room and is said to have been received as far as Texas.

Back in the United States, Beverage continued his research on antennas in Bar Harbor , where he made a discovery by December 1919. In 1921 he received a patent for a directional antenna that became the standard antenna for long-wave reception. To this day it is not only referred to as a " wave antenna ", but especially after him as a "beverage antenna". In 1923 he was awarded the IEEE Morris N. Liebmann Memorial Award for his work on directional antennas .

When Radio Corporation of America was formed and placed under General Electric , Beverage was part of the group of engineers who moved from GE to the new subsidiary in 1920. His new job was Riverhead on Long Island . The research site that he set up himself initially consisted of a tent. The focus of his work in the 1920s was on receiver development. Then he followed the general trend towards shortwave and made a significant contribution to the construction of the shortwave transmitter "WIZ" installed by RCA in February 1925 in New Brunswick. From 1930 Beverage was a senior research engineer, in 1941 he became vice president of the RCA. In 1937 he was also President of the Institute of Radio Engineers (IRE). During the Second World War he served as an advisor to the United States Secretary of War and was involved in the development of the communications system for the Allied landing in Normandy under the code name Operation Overlord in 1944 .

After he retired in 1958, he continued to work part-time as a consultant for the RCA. But he mainly continued to work privately and maintained both an office and a nearby apartment in New York. He died in 1993 at the John T. Mather Memorial Hospital in Port Jefferson, New York, at the age of 99 .

Private life

Beverage came after daughter Alida E. (1887–1910) as the second child of the island farmer and former teacher Fremont Beverage (1856–1930) and his wife Lottie H. geb. Smith (1863–1938) in North Haven, Maine. Working on his parents' farm bored him. With great interest, however, he read a physics book by his father, from his time as a teacher, and above all Modern Electrics , a magazine for radio amateurs that appeared regularly between April 1908 and 1914 . He liked to hang out at the Telephone Center in Rockland and watch the technicians make repairs. At the age of 14, the manager hired him as a helper after one of her employees came up with the idea of ​​using the technically gifted youngster to repair the approximately 65 telephones on the island. Until then, even to simply replace an electrical fuse , a team of technicians had to take the steamboat to North Haven and wait for the return trip in the afternoon for the rest of the working day. She offered Beverage an hourly wage of 20 cents an hour for repairs and gave him an old motorcycle for $ 20 so that he could more easily reach the customers of the North Haven telephone company. It was the island's first and only motorcycle, and Beverage later laughingly said that it scared the horses to death with it.

In addition to technical interests, Beverage was also musically gifted. He learned the trombone and performed while studying at the Bijou Theater in Bangor , Maine . On Saturdays and Sundays, he represented the regular trombonist who wanted to have the weekends off. In addition to music, photography was later one of his hobbies.

When he reached retirement age, “Bev”, as he was called by friends and colleagues, went on numerous trips. In particular, he attended events organized by the Union Radio Scientifique Internationale in Japan , Munich and Rome . In an interview with the IEEE History Center Beverage reported in 1992, proud that his wife before the wedding as a secretary for the Lithuanian Alliance of America have worked and therefore an aptitude for making contacts with the big shots (in German about large numbers or high animals ). During their visit to Rome, the couple also received an invitation to Castel Gandolfo , the Pope's summer residence . His wife had him during a brief conversation with Pope Pius XI. presented as an engineer. In the interview mentioned, Beverage was visibly amused even years later that they could give the impression that he, Beverage, was also a big shot among engineers . He did not have this impression of himself and declared that he was very happy that the Pope did not understand anything about engineering and that he saved him from having to answer questions.

The couple lived in Stony Brook on Long Island until the end . His wife Patricia died before him and the marriage was childless.

Work and awards

In addition to developing antennas and receivers, he carried out important basic research on general issues relating to the propagation of electromagnetic waves. He has received more than 40 patents and numerous awards for his work:

literature

  • Alberta I. Wallen: Genius at Riverhead: A profile of Harold H. Beverage , North Haven Historical Society, 1988
  • James E. Brittain: Electrical Engineering Hall of Fame: Harold H. Beverage . In: Proceedings of the IEEE, Vol. 96, No. 9, September 2008, p. 1551 f.
  • Jaques Cattell (Ed.): American Men of Science: A Biographical Directory , Science Press, 1962, Vol. 1 (A-E), p. 308

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b c d e James E. Brittain: Electrical Engineering Hall of Fame: Harold H. Beverage (PDF; 526 kB). In: Proceedings of the IEEE , Vol. 96, No. 9, September 2008, p. 1551 f. (Digitized at ieee.org ), accessed on May 7, 2018 (English)
  2. ↑ a b c d e f Oral-History: Harold H. Beverage . Interview with Frederik Nebeker, IEEE History Center , Hoboken, NJ, USA on March 16 and 17, 1992. Transcription in: Engineering and Technology History Wiki (ETHW), accessed on May 7, 2018 (English)
  3. ↑ a b Harold H. Beverage . In: Engineering and Technology History Wiki (ETHW), accessed on May 7, 2018 (English)
  4. ↑ Radio: The Voice That Failed (PDF; 9.6 MB). In: Time , Vol.XLT Number 19, May 10, 1943, p. 70 (digitized from armygroundforces.org ), accessed on May 9, 2018 (English)
  5. ↑ a b c Kurt Jäger (Ed.): Lexikon der Elektrotechniker , VDE-Verlag, Berlin, 1996, ISBN 3-8007-2120-1 , p. 43 f.
  6. ^ RCA's Research Organization, 1919-1942 . In: Hagley Museum and Library , November 30, 2016, accessed May 8, 2018.
  7. ^ List of Presidents of the Institute of Radio Engineers (IRE) . In: Engineering and Technology History Wiki (ETHW), accessed on May 8, 2018 (English)
  8. ↑ a b c Wolfgang Saxon: HH Beverage, 99, Research Scientist And Radio Engineer , obituary. In: New York Times Archives , 1993, accessed May 7, 2018
  9. ^ Fremont Beverage . In: Find a Grave , accessed on May 8, 2018 (English)
personal data
SURNAME Beverage, Harold Henry
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Beverage, Harold H.
BRIEF DESCRIPTION American electrical engineer
DATE OF BIRTH October 14, 1893
PLACE OF BIRTH North Haven , Maine
DATE OF DEATH January 27, 1993
Place of death Port Jefferson , New York