PIERCE, JOHN ROBINSON

born March 27, 1910, Des Moines, Iowa, U.S. U.S. communications engineer, scientist, and father of the communications satellite. Pierce began working for Bell Telephone Laboratories, Inc., New York City, in 1936. He improved the travelling-wave tube, which is used as a broad-band amplifier of microwaves, and designed a new electrostatically focussed electron-multiplier tube, used as a sensitive radiation detector. His Pierce electron gun produces high-density electron beams. During World War II, in collaboration with J.O. McNally and W.G. Shepherd, Pierce developed the low-voltage reflex klystron oscillator that was almost universally used in U.S. radar receivers. In 1952 Pierce became director of electronics research at the New Jersey division of Bell Laboratories at Murray Hill. Two years later he began work on the theory of communications satellites. Although he wrote numerous papers detailing the advantages of using satellites to relay radio communications to all parts of the Earth, his ideas were largely ignored. Seeing the opportunity offered by the Echo balloon satellite for studying space phenomena, he persuaded the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) to convert the 100-foot (30-metre) aluminized sphere into a radio-wave reflector. Echo I was launched on Aug. 12, 1960. The success of the communications experiments carried out with Echo I provided the impetus to develop Telstar, a satellite designed to amplify signals from one Earth station and relay the signals back to another Earth station. These early satellites marked the beginning of efficient worldwide radio and television communication. Pierce retired from Bell Laboratories in 1971 and became professor of engineering at California Institute of Technology, Pasadena; in 1979 he was named chief technologist at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena. He had begun writing science fiction in high school and later published stories under the pseudonym J.J. Coupling; in one of his stories he forecast the advent of communications satellites. His nonfiction works include Traveling-wave Tubes (1950) and Symbols, Signals and Noise (1961).