Memorial Tributes Volume 4 (1991) / Chapter Skim
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James Brown Fisk
James Brown Fisk
Pages 93-102
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From page 93... ...
information work for the Department of Defense, the organization and operation of BelIcomm in support of the national Apollo lunar exploration, and close affiliation with the Sandia Laboratories in nuclear systems research and engineering. He was especially admired for the ways in which he joined the keenest of minds to a warm-hearted regard for his associates and friends, and brought wit and humor to positions of high authority ant]
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From page 94... ...
. Accordingly, this especially decisive period in Fisk's growth involved a remarkable combination of his early and innate interest in engineering, which was expertly fortified during the MIT undergraduate years and by the influence of Draper, and the oncoming era of quantum mechanics and atomic and molecular structure.
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From page 95... ...
Jim Fisk's effective conduct of the wartime work, for which he received the Presidential Certificate of Merit in 1946, also provided occasion for his broader and lifelong interest in public service. He collaborated with William Shockley in the independent derivation of conditions for the critical mass and sustained chain reaction of an atomic pile.
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From page 96... ...
Because he had become a valued friend, collaborator, and adviser of the leading scientific and engineering personalities of the time, he was uniquely prepared to work with President Eisenhower and James Killian in the formation of the Office of Science and Technology in the White House in the late 1950s. He served as vice-chairman of the President's Science Advisory Committee from ~ 957 to ~ 960 and as consultant from 1960 to 1973.
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From page 97... ...
Ralph Bown was an unsurpassed sponsor of this, bridging as he did the productive, classical times of radio carrier cables and early microwave technology with a keen en c} perceptive appreciation of the wave/particle potentials of solid-state physics, chemistry, and metallurgy. These fields were encompassed in the new organization by the Division of Physical Sciences, of which Fisk became the executive director.
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From page 98... ...
Fisk also pursued with Kelly, and onward into his own administration of the 1960s and early 1970s, transfer of the new materials science and engineering into much of Western Electric manufacturing and the Laboratories' product designs. An example was the substitution of synthetic polymer sheathing for traditional carrier, exchange, and other cable construction a move that was later said to have saved, in cost of the expanded Bell System plants, more than the cost of the total research budget of Bell Labs for the decade in which the innovation was worked out.
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From page 99... ...
He was also an active member of the National Academy of Sciences; founding member of the National Academy of Engineering; trustee of the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, the Alfred P Sloan Foundation, the SIoanKettering Institute for Cancer Research; member of the American Philosophical Society; and a fellow of the American Physical Society and the Institute of Electrical and Electronics .
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From page 100... ...
Recognition of these accomplishments, which affected so much of the technical and engineering base of the last half of the century, took many forms. These included among others the Medal of the Industrial Research Institute in 1963, being voted an "outstanding citizen of New Jersey" citation that same year, the Washington Award of the Western Society of Engineers in 196S, the Advancement of Research Award of the American Society of Metals in 1974, the Hoover Medal in 1975, and also in 1975 the Founders Medal of the National Academy of Engineering.
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