'Portrait of the Computer as a Young Artist'


John Robinson Pierce

Milwaukee Journal Sentinel Apr 8, 2002


John Robinson Pierce, 92 Engineer who named the 'transistor'

Monday, April 8, 2002


Stanford Report, April 6, 2005 - In 1948 he coined the term "transistor" for the small, electronic switch invented at Bell Labs

San Jose, Calif. -- John Robinson Pierce, an electrical engineer who pioneered satellite communications and coined the word transistor,

died Tuesday.


Pierce, 92, also was a musician and science-fiction writer. He recorded some of the first synthesized music and wrote under the pen name

J.J. Coupling.


But he once said his greatest contribution took place in 1948 while he worked at Bell Laboratories, then the research arm of AT&T.

Colleagues had invented a solid state device that amplified electrical signals.


One of the inventors, Walter Brattain, knew of Pierce's ability with words and asked for advice for a name.

"It was supposed to be the dual of the vacuum tube," Pierce said in a PBS interview for the program "Transistorized!"

"The vacuum tube had transconductance, so the transistor would have 'transresistance.'

Copyright © Stanford Report April 6, 2005 - Robert Cannon - All Rights Reserved


more info thaT may be of Interest to you . . .

John Robinson Pierce: Co-founder of the Center for Computer Music and Research and Acoustics at Stanford University


Excerpted . . .

John Sanford of the Stanford Report. "As executive director of Bell Labs' Communication Sciences Division, Pierce oversaw work on mathematics,
statistics, speech, hearing, behavioral science, electronics, radio waves, and guided waves," Sanford wrote. "He was inventor of the Pierce Gun,
a vacuum tube that transmits electrons and is used in satellites and, among other things, the klystrons that power the Stanford Linear Accelerator."
Pierce guns are still used today in all linear-beam microwave tubes, according to Glenn Scheitrum, an engineering physicist at the Stanford Linear
Accelerator Center.

Upon retirement from Bell Labs in 1971, Pierce returned to CalTech as an engineering professor. From 1979 to 1982 he was chief technologist at the
Jet Propulsion Laboratory. In the early 1980s, he moved to Northern California, where he joined Stanford University's Center for Computer Research
in Music and Acoustics (CCRMA), working under the title of "visiting professor of music, emeritus." Financially secure, he worked without asking
for a salary. His 12-year tenure at Stanford brought intellectual credibility and financial support to the CCRMA, according to its founding director
Prof. John Chowning.

While at Stanford, Pierce authored The Science of Musical Sound (Scientific American Library, 1983) with the assistance, among others, of electrical
engineering professor, former Audio Engineering Society president, and occasional Stereophile contributor Elizabeth Cohen. The book, which recently
went out of print, is still "the best beginner's book on psychacoustics I know of," said Stereophile editor John Atkinson. Pierce was particularly
interested in the perception of pitch, but studied all aspects of psychoacoustics—how sound is generated, transmitted through the air, received by
the ear, and processed by the brain. CCRMA director and professor of music Chris Chafe said Pierce was "part of a tradition trying to understand
better the intricacies of the whole chain."

Pierce was a prolific writer, authoring or co-authoring approximately 20 books and more than 300 research papers. He also wrote science fiction;
his first story appeared in the March 1930 issue of Science Wonder Stories, when he was a 19-year-old student. His short stories were published
in Fantasy and Science Fiction, Penthouse, and other publications. Pierce was a friend of some of the greats of the genre, among them Isaac Asimov,
Ray Bradbury, and Arthur C. Clarke. (Geosynchronous satellites orbit in the "Clarke Belt," named for the author who formulated the concept.)

*blInk*

*blInk*

Yes, that was very interesting, and the only bit I knew before was ACC and his satellites.

Looking around for other such origins, I remembered hearing something about particle names:

proton
1920, coined by Eng. physicist Ernest Rutherford (1871-1937) from Gk. proton, neut. of protos "first," supposedly because hydrogen was hypothesized as a constituent of all the elements. The word was used earlier in embryology (1893) at a transl. of Ger. anlage ("fundamental thing") based on Aristotle's phrase he prote ousia to proton.

© November 2001 Douglas Harper, Online Etymology Dictionary.

If I remember correctly, Rutherford asked a classics colleague about suitable names (can't at present find any references for that.)

Some interesting snippets from People and Discoveries:

Rutherford eventually coined the terms for some of the most basic principles in the field: alpha, beta, and gamma rays, the proton, the neutron, half-life, and daughter atoms.

"All science is either physics or stamp collecting."

(referring to the difference between something fundamental and one of inconceivably many combinations of fundamental elements.)

it’s a matter of when, not if, that signal will be detected



Allen Telescope Array at UC Berkeley's Hat Creek Radio Observatory
Copyright 'Cover' photo by Seth Shostak/SETI Institute 2006



Professor William “Jack” Welch, who holds the Watson and Marilyn Alberts Chair
in the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, and former astronomy under-
graduate Cassandra Vanoutryve with the ATA antenna feed, the spiky device
that collects signals from interstellar space, at the Hat Creek Radio Observatory.
~ Copyrighted Photo by RICK FORSTER ~

" . . . it’s a matter of when, not if, that signal will be detected"

< Sharing the sky: An engineer's quiet search for extraterrestrial intelligent life by David Pescovitz


/ excerpted from FOREFRONT Magazine - Professor William “Jack” Welch . . .

One of the driving forces behind SETI, Berkeley Professor in the Graduate School William “Jack” Welch,
of electrical engineering and astronomy, can often be spotted flying high over the Cascade foothills in his
Cessna 210, zipping between the campus and Hat Creek. For Welch, a key designer of the antenna array, it’s a
matter of when, not if, that signal will be detected.

“The idea that we’re the only form of life is just not tenable,” says Welch. “We know of more than 100 organic
molecules that have already been detected in interstellar space. It’s just a matter of whether or not the deliberate
signal will have taken so long to arrive that the senders might have already vanished.”

© Copyright FOREFRONT 2006
© Copyright Regents of the University of California 2006
© Copyright College of Engineering at the University of California, Berkeley 2006




read more. . .

http://www.coe.berkeley.edu/forefront/spring2006/seti.html



© Copyright FOREFRONT 2006
© Copyright Regents of the University of California 2006
© Copyright College of Engineering at the University of California, Berkeley 2006

. . . as to Stanford / Berkeley Music - see First Post Message re:

John Robinson Pierce


> Dr. David P. Anderson (Director)- Berkeley Computer Scientist ". . . a specialist in distributed computing"


< Berkeley . . . Resume


< Education . . .


< Written / Co-Authored Papers . . . NOTE: Computer Music . . .


Excerpted -

Computer Music . . .

Special-purpose language uses multiple concurrent processes to generate separate voices, dynamic, tempo, articulation change;

hierarchical time- deformation systems; process scheduling for precise note timing and fast interactive response.

Implemented systems in Forth, C++

Copyright U.C. Berkeley 2006

'Portrait of the Computer as a Young Artist'


John Robinson Pierce

While at Stanford, Pierce authored The Science of Musical Sound (Scientific American Library, 1983) with the assistance, among others, of electrical
engineering professor, former Audio Engineering Society president, and occasional Stereophile contributor Elizabeth Cohen. The book, which recently
went out of print, is still "the best beginner's book on psychacoustics I know of," said Stereophile editor John Atkinson. Pierce was particularly
interested in the perception of pitch, but studied all aspects of psychoacoustics—how sound is generated, transmitted through the air, received by
the ear, and processed by the brain. CCRMA director and professor of music Chris Chafe said Pierce was "part of a tradition trying to understand
better the intricacies of the whole chain."

Pierce was a prolific writer, authoring or co-authoring approximately 20 books and more than 300 research papers. He also wrote science fiction;
his first story appeared in the March 1930 issue of Science Wonder Stories, when he was a 19-year-old student. His short stories were published
in Fantasy and Science Fiction, Penthouse, and other publications.

Pierce was a friend of some of the greats of the genre, among them Isaac Asimov,
Ray Bradbury, and Arthur C. Clarke. (Geosynchronous satellites orbit in the "Clarke Belt," named for the author who formulated the concept.)

[/quote]

. . . To Arthur C. Clarke and John Robinson Pierce and as an

afterthought, to Dr. David P. Anderson for All the Great Contributions @

Stanford / Berkeley . . .

Drew Lesso - COMPOSER . . .


Copyright DL 'Number LambdomaThree Dimensional Lambdoma'

The Monochord is one of the primary tools of the Harmonist