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04.07

John Stone Stone

By Michael Geselowitz

Anniversaries are wonderful opportunities to take stock and reflect on where we have been, where we are, and where we are going, as well as to celebrate our heritage. The year 2009 will be the IEEE's 125th anniversary. This reckoning is dated from the 1884 founding of the American Institute of Electrical Engineers (AIEE), the earliest of the IEEEs predecessor organizations, and in two years we can look forward to a number of recognitions and celebrations. However, an organization as complex as the IEEE can have many milestones in its history, and this month marks an interesting IEEE centennial.

The Society of Wireless Telegraph Engineers (SWTE) was founded in Boston on 25 February 1907 by an individual named John Stone Stone. Members of the growing radio field did not feel at home in the established, but power-oriented, AIEE. In January 1909, a similar radio organization, The Wireless Institute (TWI), was formed in New York, largely through the efforts of Robert H. Marriott, with some assistance from Alfred N. Goldsmith. In 1912, TWI absorbed the SWTE which had been struggling as the center of the radio industry moved from Boston to New York to form the Institute of Radio Engineers (IRE), with Marriott as its first president. In 1963, IRE merged with the American Institute of Electrical Engineers (AIEE) to form the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE). The rest, pardon the expression, is history.

However, it is worth pausing to consider John Stone Stone. If nothing else, he bears one of the most interesting names in electrical engineering history. For example, word-processor spell-checkers insist that the double name must be an error. Stone, son of Charles Pomeroy Stone and Jeannie (nee Stone) Stone, was born in Dover, Virginia, on 24 September 1869. His parents were perhaps distant cousins, and the custom among their class of having the son take the mothers maiden name as a middle name led to his interesting appellation. After attending the Columbia University School of Mines and Johns Hopkins University, he began his engineering career in 1890 as an experimentalist in the American Bell Telephone Company laboratory in Boston. Over time, he held a number of positions, eventually founding his own company and ending up as a consultant with the American Telephone and Telegraph Company.

Stone made many contributions to the fields of wired telephony and wireless telegraphy (which he called space telegraphy"). While working at Bell, he invented the Stone common battery system for telephones, characterized by the use of impedance coils between the battery and the line wires; and assisted in developing telephone transmission systems. He held several patents, including one for an important system of loosely coupled, tuned circuits for radio transmission and reception. Additionally, he authored several important technical papers.

Perhaps Stone's greatest contribution, though, was his belief that radio engineers needed their own professional society. After his SWTE was absorbed into the IRE, he served the Institute as a member of the board of directors from 1912 to 1917, as vice-president from 1913 to 1914, and as president in 1915. He was made a Fellow of the IRE in 1915 and received the Medal of Honor in 1923. John Stone Stone died on 20 May 1943 in San Diego, California. For a more complete biography see www.ieee.org/web/aboutus/history_center/biography/stone.html, and for more detail on the history of IEEE see www.ieee.org/web/aboutus/history_center/history_of_ieee.html.

Michael Geselowitz is staff director at the IEEE History Center at Rutgers University in New Brunswick, N.J. Visit the IEEE History Center's Web page at: www.ieee.org/organizations/history_center. Comments may be submitted to todaysengineer@ieee.org.