John R. Pierce

American electrical engineer

• Born: March 27, 1910
• Birthplace: Des Moines, Iowa
• Died: April 2, 2002
• Place of death: Mountain View, California

Pierce invented the Echo and Telstar satellites, the first communication satellites. Other inventions of his include the Pierce electron gun and the klystron oscillator, electronic devices used in linear particle accelerators.

Primary fields: Communications; electronics and electrical engineering

Primary invention: Echo and Telstar satellites

Early Life

John Robinson Pierce was the son of an owner of a midwestern millinery chain. Pierce’s father had no interest in science, but his mother was intensely involved in her son’s scientific and inventing interests. Pierce was early interested in Meccano construction sets. He was fascinated by electric motors, which he regarded as “a sort of natural magic,” and had his mother read to him about them. He became an avid reader of science and science fiction. Pierce attended high school for the first two years in Mason City, Iowa, then a year in St. Paul, Minnesota, and a final year in Long Beach, California. As a high school senior, he went through a phase of “glider madness”; his mother even flew with him once. Before graduating in 1929, he and two friends won a silver cup at a glider meet in San Diego, California. That year, he published his first book, How to Build and Fly Gliders. In 1930, he published his first story in Science Wonder Stories.

Pierce attended the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) in Pasadena, where he pursued science, piano, and fiction writing. Initially, he pursued aeronautics but “got tired of rivets,” and he turned to chemistry and amateur photography, planning to work for Eastman Kodak. Pierce found that he detested drafting and decided to pursue electrical engineering. After earning his Ph.D. in that discipline in 1936, he secured a job at Bell Telephone Laboratories in Murray Hill, New Jersey.

Life’s Work

Pierce worked at Bell Labs from 1936 to 1971. There he would design most of his inventions, eighty-three in all. He was told to work on vacuum tubes despite initially knowing next to nothing about the technology. He soon made numerous inventions in that field and wrote several technical and popular books on it. In 1944, Pierce met Rudolf Kompfner at a British lab and brought him to Bell Labs in 1951. Pierce greatly improved and perfected Kompfner’s traveling-wave tube, a specialized vacuum tube that amplifies microwave signals, giving it greater stability and more broadband capability. Pierce coinvented the low-voltage reflex klystron oscillator, used in X-band radar during World War II and later in satellites. Another notable invention of his was the Pierce electron gun, which produces high-density electron beams. He also introduced periodic focusing using permanent magnets, making the vacuum tubes much lighter for satellites and space travel.

In 1948, Claude Elwood Shannon (the creator of information theory), Bernard M. Oliver, and Pierce published a paper on pulse-code modulation (PCM), a technique for converting an analog signal to a digital one. “The Philosophy of PCM” became the manifesto for the eventual transformation of most analog devices into digital ones over the next half century.

In 1952, Pierce proposed the idea of communication satellites in his science-fiction story “Don’t Write: Telegraph,” written under the pseudonym J. J. Coupling. Pierce was unaware of Arthur C. Clarke’s similar idea in a science-fiction story written a decade earlier. Pierce, however, went on to actually develop the technology. He learned of large weather balloons used by the Air Force and immediately thought of using one as a passive satellite communication device. He published a technical article on the topic in 1955 but got little response. The chief executive officer (CEO) of Bell Labs initially opposed the idea, citing fears of accusations of monopoly against Bell. The next CEO supported the project, leading to the launch of the Echo satellite in 1960. Pierce next developed an active satellite, Telstar, which transmitted signals rather than simply reflecting them. Launched in 1962, Telstar broadcast television signals across the Atlantic. A nearly identical satellite, Telstar 2, was launched in 1963.

In 1952, Pierce became director of electronics research at Bell Labs, a position he held until 1962. He served as executive director of the Research-Communications Principles Division from 1965 to 1971. Pierce excelled not only as a theorist and inventor but also as a manager and mentor for many other engineers at the company. He spent much time visiting labs, asking penetrating questions, and making ingenious suggestions. He was extraordinarily talented at translating technical descriptions of projects and inventions into clear, nontechnical prose that nonspecialists could understand. Sometimes he made the nature of the invention clearer to the inventors themselves. His dozen books of popular science reflect this talent.

Pierce did not tolerate vague statements dressed in technical jargon, nor did he put up with slowness and laziness. He was intellectually impatient and could be intimidating. He was highly critical of some lines of research. For instance, he called the discipline of artificial intelligence “real stupidity” and wrote a critical report on machine language translation that led to government defunding of the field, causing it to languish for decades.

While at Bell Labs, Pierce developed an interest in computer-generated music and psychoacoustics, and he wrote books on music theory and the nature of sound. He supported research in computer music at Bell against opposition by higher executives. After hearing a performance of music by Arnold Schoenberg, Pierce wrote pioneering computer music influenced by Shannon’s information theory.

Pierce retired from Bell Labs in 1971 and took professorships at Caltech and the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), where he continued to invent. In 1983, Pierce retired from Caltech and moved to Stanford as a visiting professor of music. Finding that the computer music project at Stanford was poorly funded, he raised several million dollars to support it and never took a salary at the university. There he did major work on computer music and wrote The Science of Musical Sound (1983), on the physics of sound and the theory of computer music.

Pierce was as much a writer as an engineer and inventor. He published several science-fiction stories in Astounding Science Fiction, Penthouse, and other magazines during his career. Later in life, Pierce contracted Parkinson’s disease and moved to an assisted-living home. He died in 2002 at the age of ninety-two, survived by his third wife and two children by his first wife.

Impact

Pierce’s work has influenced the fields of telecommunications, physics, digital technology, and music. His invention of the communication satellites made worldwide television broadcasting possible and eventually led to inexpensive long-distance telephone communication. The Telstar satellite made such an immediate social impact that various musicians wrote songs named for it. Pierce’s klystrons are used in radar systems and in linear particle accelerators, such as the Stanford Linear Accelerator (SLAC). The PCM paper he coauthored inspired the decades-long development of digital systems, namely digital computers. In the field of music, Pierce codiscovered the Bohlen-Pierce musical scale, in which the octave triples rather than doubles the frequency of the original tone. The scale has been used by a handful of major computer musicians.

Bibliography

Coupling, J. J. “Don’t Write: Telegraph.” Astounding Science Fiction 49 (March, 1952): 82-96. Pierce’s science-fiction story, written under his pseudonym, presenting the idea of a communication satellite.

D’Alto, Nick. “The Inflatable Satellite.” Invention and Technology 23, no. 1 (Summer, 2007): 38-43. A brief, nontechnical account of Echo and its successors.

Gavaghan, Helen. Something New Under the Sun: Satellites and the Beginning of the Space Age. New York: Copernicus, 1998. A well-written, exciting history of technology that describes the early satellites in terms of the American reaction to the Soviet Sputnik. Bibliography.

Pierce, John R. An Introduction to Information Theory: Symbols, Signals and Noise. 2d rev. ed. New York: Dover, 1980. A clear, nontechnical, but serious and solid introduction to Shannon’s information theory. Graphs and diagrams.

‗‗‗‗‗‗‗. The Science of Musical Sound. New York: Scientific American Books, 1983. Surveys the physics of sound and the theory of computer music, with Pierce’s own theories and explanations. Contains numerous illustrations and graphs and an accompanying recording of computer music.

Pierce, John R., and A. Michael Noll. Signals: the Science of Telecommunications. New York: Scientific American Books, 1990. Lucid, nontechnical survey of the electronics, history, and social context of telephone and telecommunication devices and networks, based on Pierce’s own experience at Bell Labs. Numerous illustrations, excellent diagrams and graphs.

Whiting, Jim. John R. Pierce: Pioneer in Satellite Communications. Hockessin, Del.: Mitchell Lane: 2004. Excellent account of the life of Pierce, with an emphasis on his work on communication satellites, including background on the development of rocketry: for teenagers. Photographs, time lines, and bibliography.