Scanning the Past: A History of Electrical Engineering from the Past
Submitted by Bob Morrison, Editor

Copyright 1995 IEEE. Reprinted with permission from the IEEE publication, “Scanning the Past” which covers a reprint of an article appearing in the Proceedings of the IEEE Vol. 83, No. 4, April 1995.

James K. Clapp
Sixty-five years ago this month, the PROCEEDINGS OF THE INSTITUTE OF RADIO ENGINEERS (IRE) included a paper on antenna-measuring instrumentation by James K. Clapp. At the time he was employed as an engineer with the General Radio Company of Cambridge, MA, where he spent most of his professional career.

Clapp was born in December 1897 in Denver, CO. He worked for the American Marconi Wireless Telegraph Company during 1914-1916. He served in the United States Navy from 1917 to 1919 and worked briefly for the Radio Corporation of America in 1920. He graduated with a degree in electrical engineering from the Massachusetts institute of Technology (MIT) in 1923 and earned an M.S. at MIT in 1926. He taught communications engineering at MIT from 1923-1928. Also, he served as radio editor for the Boston Evening Transcript and as chief engineer of the newspaper’s radio broadcasting station. In 1928 he joined the engineering staff of the General Radio Company and the following year published a Proceedings paper on short-wave radio experiments. One of his first assignments at General Radio was to develop a commercial quartz crystal frequency standard.

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Scanning the Past: A History of Electrical Engineering from the Past
Submitted by Bob Morrison, Editor

Copyright 1991 IEEE. Reprinted with permission from the IEEE publication, “Scanning the Past” which covers a reprint of an article appearing in the Proceedings of the IEEE Vol. 79, No. 11, November 1991.

Browder J. Thompson
The November 1941 issue of the PROCEEDINGS OF THE IRE (Institute of Radio Engineers) included a paper on secondary-emission electron multipliers by Browder J. Thompson for whom an annual award still presented by the IEEE was later named. At the time of the paper, he worked for the Radio Corporation of America (RCA) in Harrison, New Jersey. The same issue of the PROCEEDINGS contained two other technical papers on electron multipliers by RCA engineers. Television pioneer, Philo T. Farnsworth, patented an electron multiplier in 1934 and used it in his image-dissector camera tube. RCA engineers investigated television and other applications of electron multiplication during the 1930’s. One application introduced during World War II employed an electron multiplier tube as a noise source for electronic countermeasures transmitters.

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