Ralph Hartley


Ralph Vinton Lyon Hartley was an American electronics researcher. He invented the Hartley oscillator and the Hartley transform, and contributed to the foundations of information theory.
His legacy includes the naming of the hartley, a unit of information equal to one decimal digit, after him.

Biography

Hartley was born in Sprucemont, Nevada, and attended the University of Utah, receiving an A.B. degree in 1909. He became a Rhodes Scholar at St Johns, Oxford University, in 1910 and received a B.A. degree in 1912 and a B.Sc. degree in 1913. He married Florence Vail of Brooklyn on March 21, 1916. The Hartleys had no children.
He returned to the United States and was employed at the Research Laboratory of the Western Electric Company. In 1915 he was in charge of radio receiver development for the Bell System transatlantic radiotelephone tests. For this he developed the Hartley oscillator and also a neutralizing circuit to eliminate triode singing resulting from internal coupling. A patent for the oscillator was filed on June 1, 1915 and awarded on October 26, 1920.
During World War I Hartley established the principles that led to sound-type directional finders.
Following the war he returned to Western Electric, whose research division later became Bell Laboratories. He performed research on repeaters and voice and carrier transmission and formulated the law "that the total amount of information that can be transmitted is proportional to frequency range transmitted and the time of the transmission." His 1928 paper is considered "the single most important prerequisite" for Shannon's theory of information.
Hartley formed a theoretical and experimental research group at Bell Laboratories starting in 1929 to investigate nonlinear oscillations and what later became known as parametric amplifiers. This research was mostly parallel to the work being done at the same time in Soviet Russia by Leonid Mandelstam and in Europe by Balthasar van der Pol. A short review and extensive bibliography was published by Mumford in 1960.
The Bell Laboratories work was carried on under Hartley's guidance during the 1930s and 1940s by John Burton and Eugene Peterson. Peterson later got John Manley and Harrison Rowe involved in this line of research during the 1940s which culminated in the now famous Manley–Rowe relations and several papers by the latter two authors on the topic of parametric circuits in the mid 1950s.
During World War II he was particularly involved with servomechanism problems.
He retired from Bell Labs in 1950 and died on May 1, 1970.

Awards

Probably incomplete.
  • Hartley, R.V.L., "," Physical Review, Volume 13, Issue 6, pp 373–385,.
  • Hartley, R.V.L., Fry T.C.,"The Binaural Location of Pure Tones", Physical Review, Volume 18, Issue 6, pp 431 – 442,.
  • Hartley, R.V.L., "Relations of Carrier and Side-Bands in Radio Transmission", Proceedings of the IRE, Volume 11, Issue 1, pp 34 – 56,.
  • Hartley, R.V.L., , Bell System Technical Journal, Volume 7, Number 3, pp. 535–563,.
  • Hartley, R.V.L., "A Wave Mechanism of Quantum Phenomena", Physical Review, Volume 33, Issue 2, Page 289,
  • Hartley, R.V.L., "Oscillations in Systems with Non-Linear Reactance", The Bell System Technical Journal, Volume 15, Number 3, pp 424 – 440,.
  • Hartley, R.V.L., "Excitation of Raman Spectra with the Aid of Optical Catalysers", Nature, Volume 139, pg 329 - 329,
  • Hartley, R.V.L., "Steady State Delay as Related to Aperiodic Signals", Bell System Technical Journal, Volume 20, Number 2, pp 222 – 234,.
  • Hartley, R.V.L., "A More Symmetrical Fourier Analysis Applied to Transmission Problems," Proceedings of the IRE, Volume 30, Number 2, pp. 144–150.
  • Hartley, R.V.L., "Note on the Application of Vector Analysis to the Wave Equation", Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, Volume 22, Issue 4, pg 511,.
  • Hartley, R.V.L., "The Significance of Nonclassical Statistics", Science, Volume 111, Number 2891, pp 574 – 576,
  • Hartley, R.V.L., "Matter, a Mode of Motion", Bell System Technical Journal, Volume 29, Number 3, pg 350 - 368,.
  • Hartley, R.V.L., "The Reflection of Diverging Waves by a Gyrostatic Medium", Bell System Technical Journal, Volume 29, Number 3, pp 369 – 389,,
  • Hartley, R.V.L., "A New System of Logarithmic Units", Proceedings of the IRE, Volume. 43, Number 1, pg 97,.
  • Hartley, R.V.L., "New System of Logarithmic Units", Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, Volume 27, Issue 1, pp 174 – 176,
  • Hartley, R.V.L., "Information Theory of The Fourier Analysis and Wave Mechanics", August 10, 1955, publication information unknown.
  • Hartley, R.V.L., "The Mass of a Wave Particle", July 30, 1955, unpublished manuscript, copies available from the Niels Bohr Library & Archives, American Institute of Physics, College Park MD
  • Hartley, R.V.L., "The Mechanism of Gravitation", January 11, 1956, unpublished manuscript; copies available from the Niels Bohr Library & Archives, American Institute of Physics, College Park MD
  • Hartley, R.V.L., "The Mechanism of Electricity and Magnetism", June 14, 1956, unpublished manuscript, copies available from the Niels Bohr Library & Archives, American Institute of Physics, College Park MD
  • Hartley, R.V.L., "Rotational Waves in a Turbulent Liquid", Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, Volume 29, Issue 2, pp 195 – 196,
  • Hartley, R.V.L., "A Mechanistic Theory of Extra-Atomic Physics", Philosophy of Science, Volume 26, Number 4, pp 295 – 309,

    Archival collections

Category:1888 births
Category:1970 deaths
Category:Alumni of St John's College, Oxford
Category:American Rhodes Scholars
Category:American electronics engineers
Category:Fellows of the American Association for the Advancement of Science
Category:IEEE Medal of Honor recipients
Category:American information theorists
Category:Scientists at Bell Labs
Category:University of Utah alumni
Category:20th-century American inventors
Category:Fellows of the American Physical Society
Category:Inventors from Nevada