Alan Hazeltine

Louis Alan Hazeltine (born August 7, 1886 in Morristown (New Jersey) , † May 24, 1964 in Maplewood (New Jersey) ) was an American electronics engineer.

Life

He studied at the Stevens Institute of Technology , where he received his degree in mechanical engineering in 1906. After a year of employment in a testing department at General Electric in Schenectady, he began teaching electrical engineering at Stevens and in 1917 became a full professor and head of the electrical engineering department. Inspired by an early publication by Edwin Howard Armstrong , he began his research on tube circuits and performed mathematical analyzes.

He became an active member of the Radio Club of America and Institute of Radio Engineers , where he was elected Fellow in 1921 and President in 1936.

After the United States Navy recognized the benefits of wireless voice transmission during World War I, Hazeltine became a radio consultant at the Washington Navy Shipyard in 1918 , the technical director of which was his former student LCF Horle. He developed the SE 1420 receiver for destroyers . Since the Bureau of Steam Engineering was responsible for marine radios at the time , the devices had the prefix SE .

Back at the Stevens Institute in 1922, to neutralize the grid-to-plate capacitive coupling (internal capacitive coupling) in amplifiers with a large gain factor, he developed the Neutrodyne straight-ahead receiver with De Forrest triodes, which was offered from the following year. The student Harold Alden Wheeler , who had researched in the same direction, was his assistant at the institute from 1922.

To make the Neutrodyne available to consumers, he patented it and granted licenses to small manufacturers. In 1924 he founded the patenting company Hazeltine Corporation with investors in Hoboken, near the institute, to which he sold the patents and which administered the licenses. His first employee here was Wheeler, who developed accessories such as AGC and IFF. RCA, who saw their monopoly broken and wanted a piece of the pie, initiated a lawsuit that they did not win until 1927. Around 10 million Neutrodyne had been sold by then. The improved tubes with screen grid established between 1926 and 1928 made the Neutrodyne obsolete . Since 1924 he was a fellow of the American Physical Society .

From 1925 to 1933 he took a leave of absence from the institute, where he last studied mathematics and art history in France for two years. He then worked at the Stevens until 1944 as a professor of mathematical physics. He also advised the government on broadcasting regulations. In the last years of the war he again served as an advisor to the Office of Scientific Research and Development .

After the war he devoted himself to improving the NTSC TV system and, from 1958, with his company and Leonard R. Kahn, to digital stereo AM broadcasting.

Hazeltine Corporation was acquired by Emerson Electric Company in 1986 and acquired by BAE Systems Inc. in 2007 .

Individual evidence

1. ↑ http://www.radioblvd.com/ip501.htm
2. ↑ http://www.virhistory.com/navy/rcvr-prewar.htm
3. ^ Benjamin F. Shearer: Home Front Heroes: A Biographical Dictionary of Americans During Wartime , Volume 2, p. 391
4. ^ LS Reich: The Making of American Industrial Research ; P. 231