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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Leonard F. Fuller and Naval Radio in 1916
The June 1916 issue of the PROCEEDINGS OF THE IRE (Institute of Radio Engineers) included a brief contribution on the reception of continuous wave signals by a brilliant young electrical engineer, Leonard F. Fuller. The same issue contained a paper by Louis W. Austin, head of the U. S. Naval Radio Laboratory, reporting on radio propagation experiments at the naval radio station at Darien in the Panama Canal Zone. The two papers were not unrelated since Fuller was the chief electrical engineer of the Federal Telegraph Company, which had recently constructed a 100 kW Poulsen-arc transmitter for the Darien station. In 1916, the Navy was in the process of installing high-power arc converters designed by Fuller at strategic locations around the world. (more…)