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OCR for page 93
jAMES B. FISK, a principal figure in the joining of modern
physical science to technology on behalf of the telecommu-
nications industry and national security in the electronics,
atomic, and space eras, died in Elizabethtown, New York,
on August 10, 1981. He had retired as chairman of Bell
Laboratories in 1974, having served as executive vice-presi-
dent from 1955 and president from 1959. The eighteen
years in which he was thus directly responsible for all tech-
nical programs pursued by Bell Laboratories for AT&T and
its Bell System also included major sensor ant! 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] challenging responsibility.
James Fisk's father was in business in Rhode Island when
he moved his wife and family to Tacoma, Washington, where
the children's early schooling was interrupecl by the untimely
death of Mrs. Fisk. Her parents persuaded the family that
the children shouict return and pursue their schooling in
Providence, Rhocle Island.
JAMES BROWN FISK
1910-1981
BY WILLIAM BAKER
93
OCR for page 94
94
MEMORIAL TRIBUTES
In 1927 Fisk enrolled in the Massachusetts Institute of
Technology (MIT). With an especially strong instinct for
mechanisms and the engineering base of invention and
creativity, Fisk's undergraduate concentration was in the
new pursuits of aeronautical engineering. Further, he had
come to know Professor Charles Stark Draper, who was
then just beginning his lasting role at MIT. Also, in addition
to his technical high school experience, Fisk was much im-
pressecI by Professor Taylor in mathematics, a field which
appealed to him more strongly than the relatively descriptive
(and pre-quantum theory) physics and chemistry as they
were then taught. Likewise, as Fisk came to know Draper
and his work in more depth and became his assistant in the
engine laboratory, he noticed that the physical sciences
were being animated at MIT through the leadership of the
new president, Professor Karl Compton (from Princeton).
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. For the latter, Draper recognized
the young Fisk's strong potential, and urged him to learn
more about this new wave of study of matter and energy.
Fisk enrolled in one of James Slater's earliest courses in
theoretical physics and caught the excitement of the new
fields. Then receiving the Redfield Procter Traveling Fellowship
in 1932, he went to Cambridge University where he worked
with those who were probing the nucleus, the atom, the
particle, and thinking about the new shape of natural science.
On his return to MIT, Fisk was fully involved in modern
physics and qualified for the Ph.D. general examination
without taking the traditional extended course work. He
then undertook research with Professor Philip Morse on
collision cross-sections of diatomic gases when bombarded
with electrons.
Fisk served from 1936 to 1939 as a junior fellow at Harvard.
OCR for page 95
J
JAMES BROWN FISK
95
After working on particle accelerators and an electrostatic
generator at Harvard, and with further work at MIT, he
accepted a job on the faculty of ohvsics at the Universitv of
North Carolina.
~ 1 ~
In 1939 Bell Laboratories, a separate corporation in the
Bell System wholly owned by the AT&T Company and the
Western Electric Company, sought to add cautiously to its
technical staff. This was part of the evidence of preparing
for the future that led Dr. James Fisk to accept the invitation
of Mervin Kelly to join Bell Laboratories. For what was
being sought was, of course, a new direction of science and
technology, recognizing what the era of electronics might
mean in the business of telecommunications. Although
these prospects were soon to be perturbed by a world at
war, the goals remained and the work toward them was
only delayed.
So the original excitement of the new electronics in 1939
had to be deferred for more than six years, when all Bell
Labs' efforts were converted to the development of resources
in defense of the nation. But Fisk's intrinsic capacity for
~eacersn~p soon emergect In tne radar work to which he
was assigned. In collaboration with Paul Hartman and Homer
Hagstrum, Fisk fully exercised the remarkable abilities for
joining engineering and scientific theory. In little more
than sixty days of intense design and development, this
group brought to production, for a host of vital wartime
systems, precise wave generators reaching eventually into
the 3-centimeter and I.25-centimeter wavelength region.
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. These
studies convinced Fisk of the dramatic recasting of world
peace en cl stability implicit in the production of atomic
weapons as well as in the potential of nuclear energy generally.
. . . . . . ..
OCR for page 96
96
MEMORIAL TRIBUTES
He was, in 1947, appointed the first director of research of
the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission.
Because he had become a valued friend, collaborator,
and adviser of the leading scientific and engineering person-
alities 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. In 1958-59 he was chairman
of the U.S. Technical Delegation to the Geneva Test Ban
Conference with the Soviets. In the protracted 1959 discussions
on tests and verifications of nuclear weapons development,
he foresaw and introduced many of the scientific and engi-
neering issues that remain central today in arms limitation
and disarmament negotiations.
Concurrent with these notable undertakings was, of course,
the renewed interest in the earlier visions of Kelly and others
of the future of telecommunications. The Laboratories'
administration proposed in 1946 a prominent role for Fisk
as assistant director of Physical Research.
In this context Fisk immediately applied his enthusiasm
for recruitment of genius and, likewise, set up special links
to the Chemical Laboratories and other sections of the re-
search area. These efforts were accompanied by seminars
and conferences generated originally by Shockley, in which
we drew together the many new streams of science coming
from preware Europe and especially the United Kingdom
and the postwar science and technology of the United States.
With Fisk's special new direction, connections were established
with universities worldwide. As a result, the Laboratories'
.
science and engineering stats, through these connections,
recruited directly rather than through the conventional routes
that industry had followed of Personnel Department mediation.
We arranged a network throughout the Bell Laboratories'
engineering and scientific organizations that was responsible
OCR for page 97
JAMES BROWN FISK
97
for this vital acquisition of gifted graduates. Fisk was an
ardent supporter of this strategy from its inception.
Naturally, these strong sensibilities about human abilities
coincided with Fisk's inclination to academic communities
and enterprises. After deep consideration and consultation
with his family, wife Cynthia whom he married in 193S,
and sons Samuel, Zachary, and Charles, Fisk accepted in
1947 an appointment as Gordon McKay Professor of Applied
Physics at Harvard. As noted, he was immediately diverted
to his post in the Atomic Energy Commission, but did return
to Harvard to teach until 1949. Then he was again persuaded
by Kelly and Ralph Bown, the director of research at Bell
Laboratories, that the opportunities and challenges there
matched Fisk's basic career goals. Fisk returned in mid-
1949 to the expanded Murray Hill headquarters.
Kelly and Bown had revised the organization of the Research
Department to accommodate new frontiers that we saw taking
form, and where the invention of transistors in 1947-48
had affirmed the onset of an era of solid-state science and
engineering that wouict, as the century advanced, be the
base for an information commmunications age.
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. He moved to vice-president of research in 1954.
Already it was evident that Fisk's early, deep interest in
engineering applications and expression of new knowledge
in makeable and useable operating systems would be broadly
exercised in the integrated Bell Systems. Accordingly, in
1955 he was elected executive vice-president in charge of
all scientific and technical programs at Bell Laboratories.
He demonstrated then, as later, adept and enthusiastic
OCR for page 98
98
MEMORIAL TRIBUTES
liaison with his associates in administration and in scien-
tific and engineering performance. This cooperation was
built around encouraging and expecting these contemporaries
to work as individuals to work for the advancement of the
institution and the commmunity but to take individual ini-
tiatives and responsibilities. He would not allow some
amorphous shifting of the load to an undefined institution.
Rather, each of Jim's associates and friends knew everyday
and in every way his expectations of individuality of task.
Returning to Bell Labs as the discovery of the transistor
was opening a new realm of communications computing
and information handling, Fisk soon became a leader in
realization of Kelly's and Bown's aspirations to pursue
Shockley's convictions about the electronics of solids. The
challenge of rapid application of research that Fisk promoted
and assured was reflected in development response to such
findings as the crucial oxide masking process of treating
thin films of silicon. This was preeminent in the production
of semiconductor devices and circuitry for the next twenty-
five years. Along with initiation of epitaxial growth in 1960
and preparing for the thin-fiIm integrated circuitry at the
frontier of semiconductor systems in the 19SOs, research
findings of the solar battery, and advanced traveling wave
tubes and solid-state parametric amplifiers and masers paved
the way for the experiments of the Echo passive communi-
cations satellite of 1960 and its successor, Telstar, a couple
of years later.
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 West-
ern 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.
OCR for page 99
JAMES BROWN FISK
99
Likewise, Jim Fisk was alertly sympathetic to the wide
theoretic and operational significance of mathematics research.
A range of actions during that period, such as the creation
of the first transistorized digital computer, the TRADIC,
for a government contract at the Laboratories, heightened
Fisk's understanding that the new transistorized/digital era
would be not only revolutionary for information and com-
munications but also for national strategy and the economy
generally.
As noted, he served in the White House Science Office
during this period, and in the 1960s was a member of
Presidential committees to conduct technical missions to
Europe and Asia. As a member of the board of overseers
of Harvard from 1961 to 1967 and for twenty-two years on
the MIT Corporation, being on the executive committee
from 1959 to 1978, he maintained close connections with
leaders in academic and government communities.
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 SIoan-
Kettering 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
. ~ ~
. ~ nglneers.
As a result of his endeavors on behalf of industry, academia,
and government, he received honorary doctor of engineering
degrees from the University of Michigan (1963) and the
University of Akron (1963~; and cloctor of science degrees
from Carnegie Tech (1956), Williams (1958), Newark Col-
lege of Engineering ~ 1959), Columbia ~ 1960), Colby ~ 1962),
New York University (1963), and Rutgers (1967~. These
were augmented by honorary doctor of laws degrees from
Lehigh ~ 1967) and the Illinois Institute of Technology ~ 1968) .
Jim Fisk's patriotism showed up in ways outside even his
unexcelled role in national defense and in the building of
a new American telecommunications network. Jim took
OCR for page 100
100
MEMORIAL TRIBUTES
the lead in working out a response to requests from the
White House and the National Aeronautics and Space Ac3-
ministration that the Bell System set up an engineering
cadre to assist the moon landing program. This required a
good deal of rearrangement, among the Bell System's research
development groups, that resulted in BelIcomm.
But overarching these activities was his steady effort in
Bell Labs for technical and operational gains for the AT&T
Bell Telephone System. In switching, the pioneering #1
ESS and 2A ESS, international dialing, and new traffic ser-
· · · · · —
vice systems; in transmission, new carrier, microwave transocean
(4,000 miles with 845 two-way voice channels), and satellite
systems; in telephone terminals, call distributors, (lata sets,
mobile radio, and answering units, all were among new
products developed. Some thirty-three "expert systems" of
computer software were created for advancing telephone
system reliability and efficiency.
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.
As our nation seeks now to revive and extend excellence
in citizens' thought and action, we are grateful to have had
the model that Jim Fisk embodied. The pride he took in
the 1975 establishment of James B. Fisk Scholarships, annually
awarded to children of members of Bell Laboratories, and
in the successes of his family are samples of the enduring
themes that carry onward his quest for quality.
OCR for page 101
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Representative terms from entire chapter:
brown fisk
