John Robinson Pierce

Abstract

John Robinson Pierce, an electrical engineer best known for his early ideas that led to the use of satellites for radio communications, died on 2 April 2002 of pneumonia in Sunnyvale, California, following a long bout with Parkinson’s disease. Pierce also wrote books on communication science and on acoustics, taught and composed music, and wrote science fiction under the pen name J. J. Coupling.Pierce was born on 27 March 1910 in Des Moines, Iowa. He received three degrees from Caltech: a BS in 1933 and an MS in 1934, both in electrical engineering, and a PhD in 1936 in electrical engineering and physics. His PhD thesis consisted of building a tunable electric filter to remove the fundamental of a complex waveform. His adviser was Francis Maxstadt.Pierce’s principal career was at Bell Telephone Laboratories in Murray Hill, New Jersey, where he is credited with having directed a golden age of research in communication principles and science. He joined Bell Labs in 1936 and initially designed high-frequency vacuum tubes. During World War II, he developed the reflex klystron for use with radar receivers.From 1945 to 1955, Pierce spent most of his time perfecting the traveling wave tube, which was invented by Rudolf Kompfner. It provided the high-bandwidth, high-frequency, high-power amplification essential in satellites. In 1954, years before the first satellite was launched, Pierce proposed using both passive and active satellites as relay stations for line-of-site transmission routes around Earth. He showed that feasible signal strengths would be adequate for high-bandwidth messages. At Pierce’s urging, NASA launched a passive balloon, Echo I, in 1960, that demonstrated both voice and picture communication across the US. The Bell system’s active satellite, Telstar, depended on his insights and management.Important as his personal inventions were, Pierce’s most valuable skill was his ability to manage research in diverse fields. From 1951 to 1962, he was director of research–communication principles at Bell Labs and then executive director until 1965. For the next six years, he led the division of research–communication sciences as executive director. His domain of management included research centers in mathematics and statistics, computer science, speech and hearing, behavioral science, electronics, and radio and guided waves. Pierce’s great talent was his ability to inspire associates, to understand the importance of their research, and to explain and sell their innovations to the innovators themselves and to the rest of the world. As a manager, he was seldom in his own office. He much preferred someone else’s lab, where he would appear unexpectedly to ask, “What’s new?” He also could recognize complex nonsense and had no reluctance to condemn it; for example, he described artificial intelligence as “real stupidity.”In 1971, Pierce left Bell Labs to become a member of the engineering faculty at Caltech, where he spent the next nine years. From 1979 to 1982, he worked at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory as the chief technologist, a position that had been created for him.He ended his career with undiminished creativity as a visiting professor of music, emeritus, at Stanford University, beginning in 1983. There he invented a new 13-tone music scale that spans not an octave but a tritive—an interval with a 1:3 frequency ratio. He developed a new and much needed course in musical psychoacoustics and inspired his friends to publish the course as a book.Pierce encouraged me to extend my 1957 work—digitizing speech so that computer programs for speech coding research could be easily written—to computer music synthesis programs. He composed about a dozen pieces for the computer at a time when most composers were hostile toward computers. He also enjoyed writing. Given the choice, I believe Pierce would have selected writing rather than engineering as his primary career. He published more than 20 books, 200 technical papers, and 23 science fiction stories. His earliest books concern vacuum tube design, but most of his books are on aspects of communication science. He engaged in some of his writing projects for self-education. For example, when he took on management of acoustic research, a topic far removed from designing vacuum tubes, he wrote, with Edward E. David Jr, Man’s World of Sound (Doubleday, 1958). When neural physiology was added to behavioral research, Pierce, together with Willem A. van Bergeijk and David, wrote Waves and the Ear (Doubleday, 1960). A unique work that made musical physics comprehensible to musicians was Pierce’s book The Science of Musical Sound (Scientific American Library, 1983).Pierce’s recognitions include the National Science Board’s US National Medal of Science (1963); the Guglielmo Marconi International Fellowship Foundation’s Fellowship Award (1979); and the Japan Prize (1985), which was presented by the Science and Technology Foundation of Japan. In 1995, Pierce and Harold Rosen jointly received the National Academy of Engineering’s Charles Stark Draper Prize. Pierce was posthumously inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame in 2003.Pierce appreciated the vicissitudes of life and often gave wise advice to his friends and associates. When one of his students inquired how to succeed in life, Pierce recommended that he “be smart and lucky.” I believe Pierce usually followed his own advice. John Robinson Pierce PPT|High resolution© 2003 American Institute of Physics.