Biographical Memoirs Volume 85 (2004) / Chapter Skim
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John Robinson Pierce
John Robinson Pierce
Pages 232-247
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From page 233... ...
We have all benefited from his innovativeness, intelligence, energy, and enthusiasm for communication science and technology. John Robinson Pierce was born on March 27, 1910, in Des Moines, Iowa, an only child of John Starr Pierce and Harriet Ann Pierce.
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From page 234... ...
The science fiction stories he wrote helped finance his education, and he would later state, "I wished that I could be a writer, but I thought it would be more practical to be an engineer." Even after he became one of the great research engineers at Bell Labs, he continued to enjoy writing, not only technical memoranda and books about communication but also science fiction under the pseudonym J
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From page 235... ...
magna cum laude in 1936, John went to work at Bell Labs in its facility on West Street in New York City, where he performed research on vacuum tubes, particularly electron multiplier tubes and the reflex Klystron tube that was used in X-band radars during the Second World War. While at Bell Labs, John shared an apartment in New York City with Chuck Elmendorf (Charles Halsey Elmendorf III, later a vice-president of AT&T)
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From page 236... ...
The Echo passive satellite was launched on August 12, 1960, and a message recorded by President Eisenhower was bounced off it. Pierce then went on to promote the idea for an active communications satellite, Telstar, which was to use transistors and a travelingwave tube.
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From page 237... ...
Nevertheless, after decades at Bell Labs, he found it hard to adapt to university life -- raising research money and doing formal teaching, but he much enjoyed interacting with individual Caltech students. He became emeritus at Caltech in 1980 and accepted the part-time post of chief technologist at the Jet Propulsion
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From page 238... ...
S McDonald had recently developed equipment to put digitized sound into a computer and to recover processed sound from a stream of numbers generated by the computer.
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From page 239... ...
They asked for an explanation as to the appropriateness of the work in a telephone company laboratory. With the strong support of both John and Bill Baker, Mathews was able to show them how music synthesis grew directly out of vital speech compression research and how music synthesis techniques fed back useful technology to speech synthesis.
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From page 240... ...
John certainly had strong views and a gift for summarizing these views in one-line statements. During a conference on the use of computers, including people from his division, much to John's disapproval, John dismissed the project saying, "What is not worth doing is not worth doing well." Another famous John one-liner was his dismissal of research into
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From page 241... ...
But after they're good enough, they get a little boring.1 On music I like striking and effective music. I think that one of the troubles with avant-garde is that they don't know what else to do to be different.1 Electronically produced sounds should not be part of electronics; they should be a part of the evolution of musical sound, from drum, lyre, and Stradivarius to some of today's entirely new sounds.5 On information theory Make no mistake.
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From page 242... ...
he Bell Labs, where I worked for 35 years, was the best industrial research laboratory in the world, and perhaps the best laboratory in the world.2 When I was Executive Director, the person who appeared at my door or who called me had precedence over anything else.1 On his life and creativity I've really had a lot of good fortune in my life. But you'll never have good fortune unless you believe you're fortunate.
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From page 243... ...
That is, if we are knowledgeable enough to act, and if we leave ourselves free to act.4 I do feel sure that the future will be different, and I hope that it will be better. All of my experience tells me that the way to make it so is to work hard on present problems, with an eye always open for the unexpected.6 John Pierce was an extraordinary person with many skills and an awesome intellect.
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From page 244... ...
HONORARY DOCTORATES 1961 D.Eng., Newark College of Engineering D.Sc., Northwestern University 1963 D.Sc., Yale University D.Sc., Polytechnic Institute of Brooklyn 1964 E.D., Carnegie Institute of Technology 1965 D.Sc., Columbia University 1970 D.Sc., University of Nevada 1974 LL.D., University of Pennsylvania D.Eng., University of Bologna (Italy) 1978 D.Sc., University of Southern California HONORS 1955 Elected to membership in the National Academy of Sciences 1960 Stuart Ballantine Medal (Franklin Institute)
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From page 245... ...
The Science of Musical Sound. New York: Scientific American Books, 1983.
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From page 246... ...
1983 The Science of Musical Sound. New York: Scientific American Books (A second edition published by W
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From page 247... ...
New York: Scientific American Library.
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