George C. Southworth

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George Clark Southworth (born August 24, 1890 in Little Cooley , near Athens Township, Crawford County, Pennsylvania , † July 6, 1972 in Chatham (New Jersey) ) was an American radio frequency technician .

Life

He studied physics at Grove City College, earned his Masters in 1914, and then studied another year at Columbia University . In June he started working in the radio department of the National Bureau of Standards and assisted in the preparation of Bulletin 74 Radio Instruments and Measurements published in 1918 .

In September 1918, he began teaching at Yale University , teaching officers in the US Army Signal Corps . In 1923 he received his Ph.D. with a doctoral thesis on measurements of the dielectric constant of water at frequencies above 15 MHz.

With a family to support, he took a higher-paying job at American Telephone & Telegraph . Initially he was supposed to support the editor of the Bell System Technical Journal (BSTJ), but was then transferred to the research and development department, where he was supposed to investigate the propagation of shortwave .

Waveguide

There he looked for a waveguide to transmit microwaves. In 1931, although the project was not officially authorized, he began an investigation into wave propagation in dielectric rods. At the beginning of 1932 he observed waves propagating in water-filled copper pipes. In May 1933 he was able to use high-frequency electron tubes imported from France to transmit waves through air-filled copper tubes up to 7 m in length. He later revoked that the first message transmitted via this waveguide was "Send money". After demonstrating the waveguide to his superior, he was authorized to build a larger one, almost 300 m long and approx. 13 cm in diameter. In 1934 the project was moved to Bell Labs in Holmdel , NJ and he led a small team of two engineers and a technician who developed the waveguide technology. He used Barkhausen tubes for a wavelength of 15 cm and examined the H 11 wave in the circular waveguide.

His supervisor would not approve of a publication because he feared the company would make a fool of itself. Southworth propagated the transverse electromagnetic wave , which Sergei Alexander Schelkunoff then discovered with Sallie P. Mead and John Renshaw Carson (low-loss H 01 circular waveguide wave; published 1936 in the BSTJ). Wilmer L. Barrow continued the research at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT).

Radio astronomy

In 1932 Karl Guthe Jansky discovered radio interference of stellar origin in Holmdel. In February 1942, the Briton James Stanley Hey , who was looking for the cause of a nationwide RADAR interference in the meter wave range, stumbled upon a source of interference that only transmitted during the day. Hey then found out that solar flares (in a large group of sunspots) cause more intense radio emissions than the calm sun. These findings remained secret until 1946.

Southworth discovered radio astronomy in the summer of 1942 and 1943 with a few employees and a parabolic antenna 1.5 m in diameter, the radio emission of the calm sun, in the centimeter wavelength range . They discovered the sun's microwave radiation at 3.06 GHz (9.8 cm), 9.4 GHz (3.2 cm) and 24 GHz (1.25 cm).

As was found out later, the intensity of the radio radiation at a wavelength of 10.7 cm correlates with the number of sunspots (cf. solar radio flux index ).

He also worked on antenna arrays and in April 1943 applied for a patent for a Directive microwave radio antenna (US Patent 48139043). After he retired from Bell in 1955, he still worked as a consultant.

Awards

  • 1938: Morris N. Liebmann Award from the Institute of Radio Engineers for his work on waveguides
  • 1947: Stuart Ballantine Medal from the Franklin Institute
  • 1946: Louis Levy Medal from the Franklin Institute for the sun's microwave radiation
  • 1963/64: IEEE Medal of Honor, for his pioneering work in microwave physics, radio astronomy and waveguide transmission

Publications

  • The Dielectric Properties of Water for Continuous Waves ; New Haven, Conn., Yale Univ., Diss .; 1924
  • Forty years of radio research ; 1942 (autobiography)
  • Microwave radiation from the sun ; J. Franklin Inst. 239: 285-297 (1945)
  • Principles and applications of waveguide transmission ; Toronto, Nostrand, 1950
  • George Fleek and His Descendants; History of The Fleeks and Maloneys of Northwest Pennsylvania, With Additional Notes on the History of Little Cooley, Pennsylvania ; 1958
  • Post-Revolution Chatham ; 1966

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/iel5/5/31340/01457240.pdf?arnumber=1457240

Web links

personal data
SURNAME Southworth, George C.
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Southworth, George Clark
BRIEF DESCRIPTION American radio frequency technician
DATE OF BIRTH August 24, 1890
PLACE OF BIRTH Little Cooley, near Athens Township, Crawford County, Pennsylvania
DATE OF DEATH July 6, 1972
Place of death Chatham, New Jersey