John R. Pierce

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John R. Pierce

John Robinson Pierce (born March 27, 1910 in Des Moines , Iowa , † April 2, 2002 in Sunnyvale , California ) was a versatile American engineer.

His areas of work included high frequency technology , telecommunications , acoustics and psychoacoustics . He oversaw the Bell Labs group, which developed the first functioning semiconductor amplifier, and at the suggestion of group member Walter Brattain , he coined the term transistor for it in 1947 .

On the list of his essential technical achievements are the electron cannon named after him "Pierce gun" and the theory of the traveling wave tube invented by Rudolf Kompfner .

Pierce is also considered the father of the telecommunications satellites Echo 1 and Telstar . In the psychoacoustic-musical field he was an independent co-discoverer of what he called the Bohlen-Pierce scale .

He was also the author of a series of science fiction stories under the pseudonym JJ Coupling .

Life

Pierce studied electrical engineering at the California Institute of Technology ( BA 1933, MA 1934) and received his doctorate there in 1936. From 1936 to 1971 he worked at the Bell Telephone Laboratories in Murray Hill, NJ

In 1952 he became director of electronics research and from 1958 he was research director of the Bell Lab's Communication Sciences Division .

After working at the Bell Lab, he was Professor at Cal Tech, Chief Engineer at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory and, from 1983, Professor at Stanford University in Palo Alto. In 1955 he was elected to the National Academy of Sciences , 1962 to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and 1973 to the American Philosophical Society . In 1985 he was awarded the Japan Prize . In 1995 he received the Charles Stark Draper Prize .

Works

  • BM Oliver, J. Pierce and CE Shannon : The philosophy of PCM . In: Proc. IRE . Volume 36, pp. 1324-1331, November 1948 (via Pulse Code Modulation )
  • Traveling wave tubes . Van Nostrand, New York 1950.
  • An Introduction to Information Theory: Symbols, Signals and Noise . second edition, Dover Publications, Inc., New York 1980.
  • Signals. The secrets of telecommunications . Spectrum Akademischer Verlag, Heidelberg 1992, ISBN 3-86025-024-8
  • Sound. Music with the ears of physics . Spektrum Verlag, Heidelberg 1999, ISBN 3-8274-0544-0

Web links

personal data
SURNAME Pierce, John R.
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Pierce, John Robinson (full name); Coupling, JJ (pseudonym)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION American engineer
DATE OF BIRTH March 27, 1910
PLACE OF BIRTH Des Moines , Iowa
DATE OF DEATH April 2, 2002
Place of death Sunnyvale , California