Scanning the Past: A History of Electrical Engineering
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…)