Electronics

Grisdale's years at Bell Laboratories from 1930. Graduation as a chemistry major (with strong quantum theory interests) from Harvard University, 1930. Comments on the effect of the Depression and the work environment for researchers at Bell Labs (compared to university research laboratories); nonlinear resistor work, heat treatment (varistor, thermistor), synthetic microphone carbon; involvements in various departments after the war (Electronics Apparatus Department investigating selenium rectifiers) . Concepts of industrial research; the fifth circuit (papers by B. D. H. Tellegen at Phillips Laboratories); Clarence Lester Hogan. Also prominently mentioned are: William Baker, Joseph A. Becker, C. J. Christensen, Goucher, Green, Eloise Koonce, Sidney Millman, Stanley Owen Morgan, Gerald Leondus Pearson, Merle Rigterink, John Clarke Slater, Gordon K. Teal, Addison Hughson White, R. R. Williams, J. Wilson; Bell Telephone Laboratories Electronic Apparatus Department, and General Electric Company.

Family background, early education, and science-technology interests in California and Oregon; Willamette College and radio electronics; contacts with E.O. Lawrence; career as graduate student at University of California, Berkeley, 1942-1949; war work at Berkeley Radiation Laboratory and Los Alamos; security; attitudes toward Trinity test and Hiroshima; postwar political involvement; big machines and general comments on postwar physics.

World War I developments in electronics in relation to French and British Armies; post-war revitalization of Physics Department at Columbia Univ.: Pupin Laboratory; effect of quantum mechanics; growth of nuclear physics; graduate physics during the 1920’s and Depression years; Pegram’s relation to APS; personal satisfactions in professional career.

Born 1910 Rhode Island. Engineering interest at an early age; Massachusetts Institute of Technology undergraduate, aeronautical engineering; graduate studies in physics (John Slater, Philip Morse); assistant to Stark Draper, 1932-1934; fellowship at University of Cambridge (Professor Ralph H. Fowler); internal conversion of x-rays (with Geoffrey I. Taylor, 1934); MIT Ph.D. (P. Morse) scattering of slower electrons; William Shockley; junior fellow at Harvard University, 1936-1938; work with Ivan Getting on an electrostatic generator; Harvard Society of Fellows; Bell Laboratories, 1939 (Shockley-Fisk fission work); war work mostly electronics; interaction with industrial research and with universities, 1946 reorganization of physics department forming a solid state physics group; team representing various disciplines to study fundamentals of solid state (Fisk associate director); Director of Research, U.S. Atomic Energy Commission, 1947; professor at Harvard, 1948; Director of Physics Research at Bell Labs, 1949; President of Bell Labs. Also prominently mentioned are: John Bardeen, Oliver E. Buckley, Karl Taylor Compton, Frank Jewett, J. B. Johnson, Ralph Johnson, Mervin J. Kelly, and Gerald Leondus Pearson.

Early education at Università di Pavia and Collegio Ghislieri; political involvement in the post-liberation years; experience in Holland (Utrecht and Leiden); postgraduate work with Fausto Fumi and Piero Caldirola's encouragement; evangelizing at Università di Genova and Università di Pisa and first experimental group in Milano; in 1965 Chair at Università di Parma and subsequent establishment there of a Consiglio nazionale delle richerche laboratory for the study of "materials for electronics;" attitude of Italian Communist Party leaders toward science and technology issues over the last decades, from the days of Stalinism to the autonomous stand of today; situation of a Communist physicist during the 1950s and post-1950s.

Born July 19, 1915 in Cleveland, OH; family background and early childhood growing up in Cleveland; early interest in acoustics, the flute, electronics, and radio; graduated from high school in 1933; attended Case Institute of Technology, graduating with a B.S. in physics in 1937; moved to University of Illinois for graduate school, specialized in nuclear physics research (also maintained abiding interest in acoustics); thesis research on nuclear cross sections classified by wartime Manhattan Project; completed Ph.D. in 1941; awarded Westinghouse Research Fellowship in 1941 to work on wartime microwave electronics at corporate laboratories in Pittsburgh; collaborated with researchers at MIT Radiation Laboratory; concentrated on development of magnetrons and other high-power electron tubes; accepted full time position at Westinghouse in 1944; developed x-ray image amplifier, major innovation for medical fluoroscopy; transitioned into management positions initially overseeing electronics projects (and some nuclear physics work); graduatlly moved into senior management positions focusing on research strategy and policy; retired in 1980; continued work in acoustics field.