1. Introduction

If you happened to visit a particular country home in the hills outside the small town of Franklin, New Hampshire, on certain summer mornings during the 1940s, you would see an elderly gentleman clad in jodhpurs and an ancient hat as he rolls a two-wheeled cart out on the porch of an outbuilding. He eases the cart off the porch with care because it contains a delicate acoustical recording instrument of his own design. As he heads toward the open fields, he listens for the songs of insects: crickets, katydids, cicadas. A pure scientist at last, his chief delight is now to search out and classify all the noise-making insects he can find on his property and to record their sounds with his instrument. More sophisticated than a simple wire or disc recorder, his device receives both audible sounds and ultrasonic components that are inaudible to the human ear. A receiving horn picks up these sounds and sends them to an analyzer. The analyzer, a marvel of compact battery-powered electronic engineering in an era of bulky vacuum tubes, detects certain frequency components and records the results on a moving strip of paper tape. This scientist has brought the full powers of his famed expertise to bear on the problem of cricket-chirp analysis, and this instrument is the result. When the recording is over, he motions to his young assistants nearby to go find the cricket. After weeks of practice, the young men have become skilled insect-hunters. The man with the net swoops down just as the insect takes flight. He plucks the specimen from the net and holds it in order to place it in a glass bottle for safe-keeping. The morning's outing has been a success, and now operations can move from the field back to the laboratory, where one of the assistants will observe the characteristic motions of their latest specimen under the microscope and film them with a 16-mm camera. George W. Pierce has caught another cricket for posterity.

The physics and applications of vibrations and resonances were the focus of Pierce's career. These themes appear in nearly everything he did, from his Ph. D. thesis in 1900 to the insect studies he amused himself with during the 1940s. But only in his retirement did Pierce resemble an ivory-tower scientist uninterested in practical matters. During most of his life he worked on problems whose solutions were prized by industry. And unlike many academics of his era, Pierce made sure that industry paid for the privilege of using his patented ideas. With the help of a dedicated and determined patent lawyer named David Rines, Pierce managed to extract upwards of a million dollars in royalties from corporate giants such as AT&T, RCA, and several other communications and military hardware firms. In the 1930s, Harvard viewed a professor's inventions as the private property of the professor, and made no attempt to obtain a financial interest in any of Pierce's work. Pierce conducted his invention and patent activity as Harvard's Rumford Professor of Physics, and in addition became the Gordon McKay Professor of Communications Engineering in 1935. These and many other honors are even more remarkable when we consider that Pierce was born on a farm outside Webberville, Texas, and was one of the first graduates of the University of Texas to attend Harvard for graduate study.

America prides itself as being the kind of place where a lowly cattleman's son can become an eminent professor at the most prestigious university in the country. Pierce's career is an example of that, to be sure, but it also provides a case study in the tensions between the call of pure science and the monetary rewards of practical engineering work in an academic environment. Though Pierce eventually turned his back on most of his Texas connections and may never have visited the state after 1906, certain habits of mind which he evidently formed before he left the Lone Star State never left him. Among these habits was the drive to bargain hard and persistently over anything of value that someone else wanted to pay him for. In his father's case, the valuables might have been some prime livestock. The son's valuables were the products of his fertile and ingenious brain, which he exercised to solve urgent problems in radio engineering and underwater acoustics. While he used these problems to motivate both graduate-level courses and research projects, he made sure to patent most of his practical ideas and defended many of the patents for years against attacks by the largest firms in the communications business. Yet when fellow scientists called upon his expertise, he gave it freely and without charge.

Today, when most universities lay some claim to the patents of their researchers, Pierce's case provides a counterexample of a kind that is almost unthinkable. One of the functions of history is to remind us that the way we do things now is not necessarily the only way to do them. Pierce's career at Harvard University shows how one man walked the path between pure science and "impure" technology. While Pierce made few if any fundamental scientific discoveries, he did make important contributions to the technologies of radio and what became known as sonar. But by World War II, retired, somewhat fatigued by patent battles, and no longer at the cutting edge of technology, Pierce devoted his last years to the pursuit of knowledge for knowledge's sake. He carried out his insect investigations in the spirit of pure science, but supported by funds he had wrested from the corporate world.

2. Origins

When George Washington Pierce senior sired his first son by his second wife Mary in 1872, he named him George Washington as well. But in adult life, the son never affixed "junior" to his name. In 1880, when George the son was eight, the town nearest their Texas farm was Webberville, a community of about 200 on the banks of the Colorado River some fifteen miles east of Austin. [1] Pierce's early life was not much different from that of thousands of other farm boys of the same time and place. Cattle and cotton were the two great staples of rural Texas, and in later years Pierce expressed a hearty disdain for the type of manual labor he was obliged to do in his youth. Shucking corn and watering mules with a leaky bucket was not his idea of how he wanted to spend the rest of his life. [2] He manifested his outstanding intellectual gifts in both languages and mathematics early and won an academic medal in the fifth grade of the new elementary school at Taylor, a town twenty miles north of Webberville where his family moved about 1883.

When Pierce turned eighteen in 1890, seven years after the University of Texas at Austin was founded, he was just the kind of gifted native son that the young school was looking for. College attendance was still the rare exception then rather than the rule, but Pierce's excellent academic record and his scores on entrance exams earned him advance-standing credit in English, mathematics, physics, and chemistry. Clearly, Pierce had taught himself much of what he needed to know for these examinations, since neither Taylor nor Webberville, let alone his family, could provide him with much in the way of role models and mentors for the higher academic life.

In Austin, he was fortunate to have as his physics professor Alexander Macfarlane, a Scot who spent only a few years at the University of Texas. By 1895 Macfarlane had left for Ithaca, New York, where he wrote fellow physicist Oliver Heaviside that he had left the University of Texas "on account of the perpetual strife at that institution." [3] But while he was teaching in Austin, Macfarlane revealed a new world to Pierce, a world where the products of one's mind were regarded as worthy of attention and value, a world where scientific research carried with it the promise of renown and admission to a class of society that the youthful Pierce could only dream of. Using the rudimentary equipment they found in the newly established physics laboratory in Austin, Macfarlane and Pierce managed to take enough data on the breakdown voltages of waxed paper and oil to write a paper which was published in the first volume of The Physical Review. [4] In this earliest of his many papers, Pierce set a pattern from which he would seldom deviate for the next forty years. In it, he and Macfarlane used experimental methods to investigate a phenomenon of practical interest to engineers as well as physicists. At that time, waxed paper and oil were two of the most popular insulation materials used in the rapidly growing electric power industry. While their findings did not contribute much to the fundamental physical understanding of dielectric breakdown, the paper answered certain practical questions about how the breakdown voltage changed with dielectric thickness.

After graduating from the University of Texas in only three years, Pierce took another year to acquire a master's degree there in physics. He then began a four-year period of miscellaneous jobs, such as high-school and college teaching, medical research, and clerking for the Bastrop County Court just east of Austin. The authors of the official National Academy of Sciences biographical memoir on Pierce, two former students of his named F. A. Saunders and F. V. Hunt, attribute this period of erratic employment partly to the economic recession that prevailed at the time. [5] Certainly, Pierce's talents were underutilized in these positions, which were probably taken more as a means of survival than as carefully considered career choices. By 1895, his father and older brother James had both moved into Austin, and two years later James was running a small meat market that was still operating as late as 1910. [6] But George the son had had his fill of cattle, or thought he had, when he returned to the University of Texas at Austin to spend the summer of 1897 in collaboration with another professor of physics, E. F. Northrup, who later moved to Princeton. They wrote two papers together, one of which concerned high-frequency oscillations and resonance effects.

Saunders and Hunt speculate that Northrup used his connections with members of the Harvard faculty to encourage Pierce to apply for admission there and to request a graduate fellowship. [7] This was the point at which Pierce decided to throw his lot in with the physics community. From Pierce's point of view, this was largely a leap of faith. The social and economic environment of Texas in the 1890s resembled the circumstances of a third-world country today, and the life of the mind was something he had only read about and heard of from Northrup and Macfarlane. But he must have believed what they told him about the world of academic scientific research, because he applied to the graduate schools of the University of Chicago and Harvard. In later life, he would say that his choice was made in favor of Harvard because he had to work his way from Texas to St. Louis on a cattle train as chief wrangler. As he searched the freight yards for a similar means of transportation, he found a sheep train heading for Chicago and another cattle train heading for the East Coast. For a true rancher's son, the choice was clear: cattle, not sheep, so Harvard it was. [8] By whatever means he chose Harvard, he recognized at this point that to live a life of research, he had to leave Texas for a place with a longer tradition of higher education. Texas's loss was Harvard's gain, and in 1898 Pierce set foot for the first time on the streets of Cambridge.

The best that can be said about the physics department at Harvard University at the turn of the twentieth century is that its members were trying hard, with some success, to realize the research vision that had spread from institutions such as Johns Hopkins to other centers of higher learning in the U. S. during the previous two decades. Experimental work was carried on in the Jefferson Physical Laboratory, built with a donation from a descendant of Thomas Jefferson in 1884. [9] Northrup's friend John Trowbridge directed the Laboratory, and also directed Pierce's work on a second master's degree and a Ph. D., which Pierce completed in 1900.

Applied research in physics was not unknown at Harvard in the late 1800s. As early as 1888, Trowbridge and his student Samuel Sheldon investigated the problem of how to neutralize the harmful effects of induction in telephone circuits. Sheldon went on to become President of the American Institute of Electrical Engineers in 1906. [10] But for the best possible training in the latest physics, the usual thing at that time was to go abroad. Germany was the most favored goal of American physics pilgrims. Accordingly, Pierce obtained a fellowship and spent the academic year of 1901-02 studying with Ludwig Boltzmann in Leipzig, touring the countryside, and learning German and Italian. [11] Boltzmann, then near the end of his career, was suffering the effects of a depression which would contribute to his eventual suicide in 1906. [12] There is little if any sign in Pierce's published work of the type of advanced statistical physics that Boltzmann used to establish the kinetic theory of gases. Perhaps the most lasting effects of Pierce's stay in Europe were a facility in reading German and a high esteem for European physics as a source for the latest ideas to apply in the new field of wireless.

Midway through his stay in Germany, Pierce would have learned of the stunning achievement of Marconi, who spanned the Atlantic with wireless telegraphy in December of 1901. Of course, Marconi was not the only person who was eagerly trying to transform Hertz's discovery of Hertzian waves into profitable technology. The fact that Marconi shared the 1909 Nobel Prize in physics with Ferdinand Braun shows that other Europeans were at least competitive with Marconi in the area of practical developments in the technology of wireless. But while Braun and others made impressive technical contributions, it was not at all clear at the time how anyone could turn their ideas into profitable inventions, since the applications of wireless communications seemed to be rather limited. Nevertheless, Pierce returned to Harvard convinced that this new technology was going to be his ticket to renown. Following his appointment as an instructor in physics, he embarked on a series of research projects designed to bring some scientifically-informed discipline to the rough and rowdy world that was then American wireless.

As Susan Douglas has shown, there were two distinct cultures of U. S. radio users during the fifteen years or so before World War I. The first was the corporate culture dominated by the American Marconi Company, although many other firms tried to enter the field as well. The smaller corporations looked for ways to profit from wireless either by competing for domestic message traffic with the common-carrier telephone and telegraph systems, or competing for international traffic with Marconi and other entities sponsored by national governments. These corporations were prepared to spend large amounts to secure the best possible technology and hired technical experts to help them, but were not usually managed with the long term in view. The second culture was represented by the individual radio amateur, technically unsophisticated but eager to try out the latest ideas. [13] Pierce had some characteristics of both cultures. Like the amateurs, he prized his independence highly, and his academic position enabled him to remain financially independent of the corporate culture throughout his life. Although he would from time to time take on consulting and expert-witness jobs for corporations, he always negotiated these arrangements on a case-by-case basis and made sure he was never locked in to a long-term commitment.

It is clear from the record of his patent applications that Pierce hoped to profit from the new technology of radio mainly by means of patent royalties and sales. In 1906 and 1907, he filed several patents on tuning circuits and crystal detectors, and assigned these to the Massachusetts Wireless Equipment Company, probably in exchange for a consulting fee and assistance in filing the patents. Neither these patents nor the ones he filed in 1913-1914 on mercury-vapor tube devices led to any widely marketable technology, although Pierce evidently sold his tube patents to Peter Cooper Hewitt, the inventor of the mercury-arc lamp.

What probably contributed the most to Pierce's standing in both the academic and industrial realms of radio of this period was the publication of his first book in 1910. Principles of Wireless Telegraphy reflected Pierce's wide-ranging practical and theoretical interests. For several years prior to 1910, he had taught graduate courses in wireless technology at Harvard, and in the preface he said that the book consisted of the "non-mathematical portions" of these courses. [14] Its twenty-eight chapters gave highly readable reviews of the physical principles underlying wireless, described past and current devices and instruments in great detail, and were profusely illustrated with engravings and photographs. Released in September of 1910, the book sold 800 copies by the following April, and received favorable reviews. [15] Shortly after it was published, George Squier of the U. S. Army Signal Corps informed Pierce that the Corps' Academic Board of the Army Signal School in Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, had recommended the adoption of Pierce's text to replace one by British radio physicist John Ambrose Fleming. [16] Although a little American chauvinism might have been at work in that case, Pierce's book was a truly comprehensive and up-to-date treatment of a rapidly advancing field. The fact that he was a professor at Harvard did not hurt, but his substantial physics background and vigorous, clear, non-mathematical prose also helped make the book a success.

Writing specialist books was gratifying, no doubt, but neither then nor later was it a path to wealth. For this, Pierce would have to look elsewhere, but not without compromising his view of the integrity and independence of his research work.

4. Pierce's View of Research Integrity: The 1914 Letter to AT&T

In 1914, the American Telephone and Telegraph Company was very concerned that the new technology of radio telephony might disturb its comfortable monopoly on telephonic communication in the U. S. Business historian Leonard Reich has said that "the company saw in radio telephony an as-yet unperfected but potentially disruptive technology that might require it to connect into others' long-distance communications or even circumvent its carefully assembled patent protection for telephone service." [17] Accordingly, AT&T established a special radio and vacuum-tube research facility that would eventually become known as Bell Laboratories. A year earlier in 1913, the firm had purchased Lee DeForest's critical patents on the potentially useful but crude "audion" three-element vacuum tube in a move to consolidate their patent position. [18] Frank B. Jewett, then assistant chief engineer of Western Electric, went on a hiring binge around this time and scoured the country for the best radio experts available.

On March 4, 1914, Pierce received a letter in which Jewett asked him to consider "taking charge of our physical laboratory." [19] It is probably fair to say that if Pierce had accepted this offer, he would have become head of the most advanced industrial radio research lab in the world. The same day, Pierce wrote back to decline the offer, saying that "it is highly improbable that I should make any change from my present position. Harvard is just now building a new laboratory for radiotelegraphic engineering and high tension research, and I have been informed that I shall be made director of this laboratory. In addition to this I have on hand at present some fairly lucrative consulting work along these lines. I feel, therefore, that I am well settled in my present position." [20]

The new laboratory Pierce referred to was the Cruft Laboratory, which included a new building and funds for research equipment. Although Harvard was generous to Pierce in this regard, its resources could not match those of AT&T. But Harvard also provided Pierce with something AT&T, by its very nature, could not promise: freedom of a kind only to be found in academia.

Despite the prompt turn-down, Jewett persisted in trying to obtain the benefit of Pierce's expertise for AT&T. If he couldn't have Pierce as an employee, he would try to set up a consulting arrangement. Some time before September 19, 1914, Jewett discussed this possibility with Pierce. [21] On October 18, Pierce wrote a long reply to Jewett. This letter, besides explicitly stating the terms under which he would consider consulting for AT&T, provides an insight into Pierce's philosophy of technological research in academia. It is worth quoting at length:

In these two items, Pierce made clear that his intellectual independence came first. While he would not publish results that AT&T engineers originated and that Pierce learned about in the course of business, he also insisted upon total freedom to publish anything he or his students came up with.

In the next few items, he addressed the questions of patent assignments and purchases:

The next item, no. 7, has a "heads I win, tails you lose" quality:

For a number of obvious reasons, this proposal was unsatisfactory to AT&T, and it is very unlikely that such an agreement was ever consummated. In 1917, Pierce moved temporarily to New London, Connecticut to do war-related research for the U. S. government, which dominated his time for the next two years. [23] And from 1921 to 1940, Pierce kept an account book of all sources of income, for tax and other purposes. Although he invested heavily in AT&T stock (and exclusively, except for savings banks), no entry of consulting or other non-investment income from AT&T occurs until much later. [24]

Several of Pierce's most consistent and dominant characteristics emerge in this letter. The most notable, as I have said, is independence. Absolutely no one could tell him what to work on at Harvard, and he was free to investigate anything within the capabilities of his own expertise and the well-equipped facilities of the Cruft Laboratory. As a hired hand at AT&T, no matter how lofty his title and how generous the salary and lab budget, Pierce would have lost this kind of autonomy the minute he walked in the door. Accordingly, in the quasi-legal language of the agreement he proposed to Jewett, he jealously guarded his freedom to pursue other lines of research, to engage in other consulting arrangements, and even to use equipment paid for by AT&T for general laboratory work. The consulting fee he demanded was comparable to his Harvard salary at the time, but financial considerations were probably not the main reason that AT&T rejected Pierce's proposal. If Jewett had agreed to Pierce's terms, the company would have established a precedent for other consulting arrangements that could prove inconvenient and even embarrassing in the future. All in all, the agreement would have run counter to one of the firm's main goals in research, which was to strengthen its patent position. Both Pierce and Jewett probably knew that some ideas in collaborative research develop in a way that simply does not permit the clear-cut assignment of ownership such as Pierce outlined in his letter. In the circumstances, declining Pierce's proposal seemed like the best thing to do. But this was by no means the last time AT&T and Pierce were to disagree.

5. A Gentleman's War: Pierce, AT&T, and the Crystal Oscillator Patents 1924-1933

The significance of Pierce's most profitable invention is best understood against the background of the technical status of radio-frequency measurement and control in the early 1920s. Just as the spectral purity and intensity of the laser made many new applications of optical technology possible, the triode vacuum tube could be used to generate so-called "continuous waves" that were essentially a single radio frequency instead of the broad spectrum of waves generated by the earlier spark transmitters. After World War I, the National Bureau of Standards, military agencies, Pierce, and other radio experts studied how to generate and measure the frequency of radio emissions with increasing accuracy. In January of 1923, Pierce participated in a nationwide effort to measure standard-frequency transmissions from the NBS's new station WWV outside Washington, D. C. Some sixteen laboratories measured a series of transmitted frequencies and forwarded their independent results to the Bureau. Only about a third of these results were within 0.5% of the NBS's values. Part of the problem was that the transmitter at WWV drifted unavoidably during the transmissions. [25]

This was because, in common with all other transmitters at the time, its frequency was determined by a resonant circuit consisting essentially of an inductor and a capacitor or capacitors. These components were made out of conductors and dielectrics whose physical condition and position materially affected the electrical characteristics of the circuit. Temperature, vibration, and other factors changed these characteristics, and so even the nation's standard-frequency transmitter could not remain at a constant frequency for more than a few seconds at a time.

Clearly, there was a need for a better way to stabilize and measure radio frequencies. The answer to the problem came, not from incremental improvements in radio circuits, but from the hitherto little-used physical phenomenon of piezoelectricity.

In the early 1880s, Jacques and Pierre Curie initially described piezoelectricity as the appearance of electric charges on certain surfaces of certain crystals subjected to mechanical stress. It was soon found that the effect worked reciprocally; that is, applying an appropriate electric field to the same types of crystals caused mechanical stress to appear as well. The French physicist Paul Langevin made one of the first notable attempts to apply piezoelectricity to a practical use when he began to investigate the echo-ranging detection of submarines during World War I. In 1917, he demonstrated a piezoelectric transducer using quartz that could detect sounds at a distance of 6 km underwater. [26]

In the same year, AT&T began to investigate possible uses of piezoelectricity in telephone work. A paper published in 1919 by Western Electric researcher Alexander McLean Nicolson described his attempts to grow Rochelle-salt crystals and to use them in loudspeakers and microphones. [27] He chose this material over quartz because of its greater mechanical response to a given electric field. Nicolson filed patents on his work, but his research did not lead directly to any important developments in telephone technology.

By all accounts, the first person to conceive and reduce to practice the idea of using a piezoelectric quartz crystal to measure and stabilize radio-frequency waves was Walter Guyton Cady. As early as 1919, guided by a sophisticated understanding of the physics and mathematics relevant to the problem, this physicist at the small liberal-arts Wesleyan University in Middletown, Connecticut was experimenting with carefully cut quartz bars in radio-frequency circuits. In October of 1921, Cady submitted a paper to the Proceedings of the Institute of Radio Engineers which described some of the fruits of his research. [28] Cady had developed a crystal-stabilized vacuum-tube circuit that was more than one hundred times as stable as the best available inductor-capacitor circuits. Cady's circuit was complex, requiring three vacuum tubes and a crystal with four electrodes. But he knew that his invention had potentially great commercial applications, and he applied for patents on it in 1920 and 1921. [29]

Pierce was naturally interested in Cady's work, having made Cady's acquaintance by mail as early as 1915 during some experiments Cady was conducting in radio. [30] Throughout most of his active career, Pierce made a sharp distinction between those he regarded as scientists and those he regarded as engineers and representatives of corporate interests. To scientists, he was open, hospitable, and went out of his way to share technical details that would help them in purely scientific investigations. [31] But to corporations, he released valuable information and patents only after receiving what he regarded as fair remuneration. Other physicists were consequently as forthcoming as Pierce in communicating to him their new findings, and in January of 1923, Cady showed Pierce his crystal oscillator circuit. [32] (An oscillator circuit is one which generates periodic voltages or currents: oscillations.)

Pierce, with his extensive experience in practical radio, lost little time in duplicating and then simplifying Cady's circuit. In August of 1923, Pierce submitted a paper describing his own new developments to the Proceedings of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. [33] Although Pierce eventually patented several concepts relating to piezoelectric oscillator circuits, I will describe only the most important one in some detail.

Until 1920, essentially all vacuum-tube radio oscillator circuits used inductors and capacitors both as frequency-determining elements and as means to feed back part of the amplified energy from the output of the tube to the input in order to sustain oscillations. Although several researchers had included piezoelectric crystals in such circuits, it was difficult to adjust the circuit components so that the frequency was controlled by the electromechanical resonance of the crystal, and not the electrical resonance of the inductors and capacitors. Cady's crystal-controlled oscillator circuit had no inductors or capacitors, but it used three expensive vacuum tubes and a long four-terminal crystal. After some months of laboratory work, Pierce discovered a very simple crystal-controlled oscillator configuration that used only one tube, a two-terminal crystal, and no inductors or capacitors in the feedback circuit. It was no more stable than Cady's oscillator, but its flexibility and ease of construction and use compared to Cady's circuit was a tremendous practical advantage. Soon after he developed these improvements, Pierce began to work with his patent lawyer David Rines to draft a patent on them.

This was not the first time Pierce had called on Rines for patent work. Rines, a Russian emigre to the U. S. and Harvard graduate, took a course under Pierce before World War I while working as an astronomer for the U. S. Naval Observatory. Rines then moved from science to the law, and after stints as a patent examiner in Washington and as a patent attorney for Westinghouse Electric and Manufacturing Corporation, he opened a private practice devoted to patent law in Boston around 1919. In 1920, Pierce turned to Rines for help in defending his existing patents and in filing new ones. [34] Partly as a result of these efforts, Pierce and two partners, Max Mason and Harvey Hayes, realized substantial returns in the early 1920s from royalties on military equipment for the detection of submarines and other underwater sound sources. In the period 1921 to 1924, for example, Pierce's royalty income from the General Radio Company of Cambridge under a Navy contract for underwater acoustical equipment was $149,880 at a time when his Harvard salary was $6,250. [35] So by the mid-1920s, Pierce and Rines had become a well-trained team of inventor and patent lawyer, highly capable of taking on individuals and corporations who threatened their own interests or those of Pierce's patent licensees.

A balanced, detailed record of the patent battle between Pierce and Rines on one side and the American Telephone and Telegraph Company on the other would require much more time and legal expertise than I have. In broad outline, here is what happened. As the technology of crystal oscillators began to spread after Cady and Pierce published their papers in the open literature, researchers in private and government laboratories began to apply for and receive patents that Rines believed were in interference with Pierce's application. With Pierce's encouragement, Rines filed interferences with the U. S. Patent Office. For reasons having to do with Patent Office procedural rulings, Rines re-filed Pierce's original application at least three times, in 1926, 1928, and 1931. [36] At least one of these re-filings took place in connection with a patent of Alexander Nicolson's. Nicolson, you will recall, was the Western Electric researcher who began investigating Rochelle salt, not quartz, as a promising piezoelectric material. AT&T claimed that the essentials of Pierce's application were covered by Nicolson patents issued or pending. Neither Rines nor Pierce was willing to grant this argument, since it would cripple whatever patents Pierce would eventually receive.

The time-honored techniques that large corporations employ against independent inventors are well known. Initially, the corporation tries to buy the patent rights outright with a lump-sum payment. If the inventor will not settle for this, it is to the rich corporation's advantage to drag litigation on indefinitely as long as the expenses of patent litigation do not exceed the ongoing value of the technology to the corporation. Unlike individuals, corporations are legally immortal. Most rational inventors will balance the prospect of interminable legal fights against the definite value of a lump-sum settlement and choose to settle, usually sooner rather than later, for an amount that may be only a fraction of the true value of the technology to the corporation.

Up to a point, all the legal proceedings between Pierce and AT&T were interferences, which are essentially private matters between the parties involved and the Patent Office. Until the Patent Office resolves an interference, a patent cannot be issued. From the moment of its introduction, the technology of crystal-controlled oscillators proved to be increasingly valuable for both radio applications and certain purposes in long-distance wire telephony. Technically advanced amateur and commercial radio stations adopted the new technology, which now kept their transmissions stably on a single frequency to within a small fraction of a percent. In 1932, the Federal Radio Commission (predecessor to the FCC) issued a new regulation about frequency tolerance for broadcast stations. It tightened the permissible deviation from the assigned frequency from ± 500 cycles to ± 50 cycles. The tighter tolerance could be met only with the use of crystal-controlled apparatus. Such apparatus was expensive, and this tightened regulation was one factor that drove many smaller educational and non-profit stations off the air during this time. [37]

In view of these developments, AT&T was increasingly motivated to delay the issuance of Pierce's patents through interference proceedings. When the issue was finally settled between Pierce and AT&T, the corporation began a new set of proceedings on behalf of its manufacturing arm, Western Electric. Rines, in a clever but risky move, decided to file suit in open court against AT&T, charging the company with monopolistic practices. In the anti-monopoly climate of the 1930s, this was a kind of publicity that AT&T did not need.

Rines's lawsuit finally did the trick. According to Rines's son Robert, who later handled some of Pierce's legal work after David Rines retired, one day the president of AT&T showed up at Harvard University's Cruft Laboratory. Walter S. Gifford was a Harvard alumnus, class of 1905, and a reasonable man. He went into Pierce's office, extended his hand, said, "Call me Walt. Let's talk about AT&T taking a license." [38] Whether or not this meeting actually took place, it is a documented fact that on Dec. 14, 1936, AT&T send Pierce an agreement to pay annual royalties in the amount of $17,000 for a license to use his crystal oscillator patents when and if they were issued. With AT&T's opposition out of the way, the Patent Office finally issued seven of Pierce's crystal-oscillator patents on Oct. 18, 1938. [39]

Back in 1932, on the strength of their legal successes thus far, including the issuance of a patent covering specific uses of crystal oscillators, Pierce and Rines had reached a crystal-oscillator license agreement with RCA, which controlled virtually all the important U. S. radio patents. At that time, Rines received an additional motivation to work hard when Pierce agreed to pay him one-third of all future proceeds from certain patents. [40] This RCA agreement, plus a similar license arrangement with the U. S. government, netted Pierce well in excess of $100,000 in crystal-patent royalties and license fees from 1932 to 1940, when he retired from Harvard. [41] And this figure does not include the $17,000 in annual license fees which AT&T paid him from 1936 onward for a number of years.

Even as strong-willed an individual as George W. Pierce could not entirely ignore the strain of continuous patent litigation. It was bound to affect his attitudes toward other things, including his willingness to share his work with other academics. In the fall of 1938, a young radio scientist named Ronold W. P. King interviewed for a position in communications engineering at Harvard. When Pierce was introduced to King, the latter asked Pierce, "Would you like to show me your research?" King recalls that Pierce replied, "No, you might copy it and publish it." Pierce refused to tell King anything he was doing. [42] While the accuracy of this recollection after a lapse of over six decades may be questioned, it is consistent with the picture of a scientist past his technical prime who might have felt threatened by the person who ultimately replaced him at Harvard.

After Pierce retired in 1940, he continued to pursue profitable legal activities relating to his patent holdings from his summer home in New Hampshire and a winter home in Florida. Well supplied with funds, he built a small laboratory building on his New Hampshire estate to carry on the researches of sound-emitting insects that now attracted his restless energies. Free at last to pursue any line of investigation his heart desired and his resources and ingenuity permitted, he found an apparently endless fascination in studying the katydids, crickets, cicadas, and other noisemaking insects that populated the New England fields in the summer time. He published one paper and one book on this research before a series of strokes gradually disabled him. [43] George W. Pierce died in Franklin, New Hampshire on August 25, 1956.

6. Conclusions

Pierce ended his career by pursuing science the way modern science began: as an activity of the idle rich, done not with any practical intention but purely for the sake of knowledge as its own justification. The tension between the alleged purity of science and the money-grubbing world of technology was the subject of intense debate in this country as recently as the 1950s, when federally-funded big-science projects became a way of life for many scientists. The debate, such as it was, is now over. Discussions of how science ought not to be corrupted by the money and political horsetrading that comes with technological applications are today heard mainly among gatherings of historians such as this one. Every research university now routinely expects their researchers in the hard sciences and engineering to raise external funding in amounts that exceed their salaries, and to sign over to the university patents discovered on university time without a quibble. The vaunted independence of the academic life is still there, but in a much modified form that Pierce would scarcely recognize.

In his long and productive life, Pierce experienced the temptation (or opportunity) to turn his scientific prowess into cash well in advance of the cadre of scientists who were faced with the same choice after World War II. Pierce was fortunate to work in the field of radio research when fairly modest experimental equipment could still yield important new results. A clever independent researcher like Pierce could outfox the much better funded but less agile AT&T Corporation both in the laboratory and in court. I have described only a few of the rich ironies of Pierce's relationship with AT&T. Not only did he invest much of his royalty income in AT&T stock, the dividends of which he used to pay his patent lawyer to fight AT&T, but he also trained many of the best researchers that AT&T later directed to develop systems which depended on his patented ideas for their operation. For example, W. A. Marrison, a Harvard graduate who very likely took courses from Pierce, developed one of the earliest crystal-controlled frequency standards for the Bell System in 1929, in the midst of Pierce's legal battles with Marrison's employer. [44] Since AT&T monopolized the U. S. telecommunications industry, the students, ideas, and patents of a telecommunications researcher like Pierce were bound to end up at AT&T one way or another. But Pierce, ever the horsetrader, made sure that in dividends, royalties, or license fees, AT&T paid him what he regarded as a just return.

A principle of good book reviewing states that the reviewer should not criticize the author for the book he didn't write. Something like that principle should apply to my review of Pierce's career. It is perhaps not fair to Pierce to ask what contributions to pure science he might have made if he had not spent so much of his energy and time on patent litigation. Bruce Hunt has pointed out to me that Pierce's physics training was very much in the nineteenth-century string-and-sealing-wax experimental school, in which precise mechanical measurements often played a primary role. With the advent of quantum mechanics in the 1920s, most such experimentalists gradually fell by the wayside. Even if Pierce had pursued a more purely scientific direction, his style and approach would have become dated even before World War I, and it is unlikely that he could have made discoveries in physics that would have gained him a reputation comparable to the one he enjoyed as America's premier academic radio expert.

As things turned out, Pierce brought a good measure of honor to Harvard, to his undergraduate alma mater, the University of Texas, and to his native state with his engineering achievements. He was elected to the National Academy of Sciences in 1920, received a Medal of Honor from the Institute of Radio Engineers in 1929, and the Franklin Medal in 1943. These were no small achievements for someone whose first job on record was watering mules with a leaky bucket.

I wish to thank Bruce Hunt and the Lone Star History Association for the opportunity to present this paper. At a SHOT conference two years ago, Maggie Dennis of the Smithsonian Institution introduced me to the Pierce saga with some questions about quartz crystal oscillators. My stay at the University of Texas at Austin during 1999-2000 is supported by a National Science Foundation Science and Technology Studies Fellowship. The videotape of G. W. Pierce in retirement is courtesy of the Harvard University Archives. And my wife Pamela provided much-appreciated graphics assistance.

References