John Robinson Pierce, a wide-ranging engineer, inventor, writer, and psychoacoustics researcher, died April 2 at El Camino Hospital in Mountain View, CA. The cause of death was complications from pneumonia. Pierce was 92.A native of Des Moines, IA, Pierce earned his BS, MS, and Ph.D from the California Institute of Technology. In 1936, the year he left Caltech, he joined Bell Telephone Laboratories in Murray Hill, NJ, an institution that harbored some of the most creative minds of the mid-twentieth century, and one that originated many of the technologies that have become ingrained in the fabric of modern life.Pierce became director of electronics research at Bell Labs in 1952 and research director of communications principles in 1958. Among his many contributions was a design for an unmanned communications satellite that was incorporated in the Echo I, launched in 1960. The satellite enabled the relay of signals from Caltech's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) on the West Coast to a Bell Labs station in New Jersey. The success of that experiment led to the construction and 1962 launch of Telstar I, the first commercial communications satellite and the first to transmit live television signals across the Atlantic. The network of communications satellites that rings the earth today is a direct result of Pierce's work.
He was widely credited with coining the term "transistor" (likely a contraction of "transfer resistor") for the revolutionary device invented by William Shockley and his Bell Labs colleagues in the late 1940s. Pierce was a tireless inventor and investigator, according to 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.)As an engineer and inventor, John Pierce was granted about 90 patents. He received many honorary degrees and awards, among them the 1985 Japan Prize. In recognition of his work with communications satellites, he was co-winner of the 1995 Charles Stark Draper Prize with collaborator Harold Rosen.Pierce is survived by his wife Brenda Woodard-Pierce of Palo Alto; a son, John Jeremy Pierce of Bloomfield, NJ; and a daughter, Elizabeth Anne Pierce of Summit, NJ. A memorial service is scheduled for 2pm Friday, May 3, at Stanford Memorial Church, with a reception and concert to follow at CCRMA.
