A Texan at Harvard: George W. Pierce,
Radio Communications Pioneer
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George Washington Pierce was born on January 11, 1872 on a farm near Webberville, Texas, 15 miles east of Austin. His 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. He manifested outstanding intellectual gifts in languages and mathematics early on and won an academic medal in the fifth grade at the new elementary school in Taylor, a town 20 miles north of Webberville. When Pierce turned 18 in 1890, seven years after The University of Texas was founded, he was the kind of gifted native son that the young school was looking for. A college education was still the rare exception in Texas, but Pierce's excellent academic record and his scores on entrance exams earned him advance-standing credit in English, mathematics, physics, and chemistry. 
At The University of Texas, Pierce studied with physics professor Alexander Macfarlane, who revealed a new world where scientific research gave access to an intellectual life that the youthful Pierce could only dream of exploring. Using rudimentary equipment from the newly established physics laboratory in Austin, Macfarlane and Pierce managed to record enough data on the breakdown voltages of waxed paper and oil to write a paper that was published in the first volume of The Physics Review. After graduating from UT in only three years, Pierce spent another year in Austin acquiring a master's degree in physics. Upon completion of the M.S., he was encouraged by his professors to seek graduate fellowships at other universities, in particular, Harvard University. For Pierce, pursuing physics required a leap of faith. The intellectual environment of Texas in the 1890s was limited and provincial, and a career in science was something he had only heard about from his professors. But Pierce applied to the graduate schools of the University of Chicago and Harvard. In later life, he would say he chose Harvard because he had to work his way from Texas to St. Louis on a cattle train as chief wrangler, and as he searched the Missouri freight yards for further transportation, he found a sheep train heading for Chicago and another cattle train heading for the East Coast. As Pierce would eventually explain to his graduate students, the choice for a true farmer's son was clear: cattle, not sheep. So Harvard it was. In 1898 Pierce set foot for the first time on the streets of Cambridge, Massachusetts. The native Texan received a PhD from Harvard in 1900. After a brief hiatus to study with Ludwig Boltzmann in Leipzig, Germany, Pierce returned to Harvard, where he taught physics from 1903-1940 as both the Rumford Professor of Physics and a professor in Communications and Engineering, offering some of the earliest courses in radio communications. In 1909, he spearheaded the founding of the Radio Society of the Institute for Geographic Exploration, which came to be known as the Harvard Wireless Club, the nation's oldest club for amateur radio technicians and broadcasters. During his tenure at Harvard, Pierce published numerous scientific and technical papers, as well as one of the earliest American textbooks on radio, Principles of Wireless Telegraphy, which was used by the U. S. Army signal division for training in the new field. 
He also became the director of Harvard's Cruft High Tension Electrical Laboratory upon its establishment in 1914. There he did work that led to the practical application of a variety of discoveries, most notably the Pierce Oscillator, which utilizes quartz crystal to keep radio transmissions precisely on the assigned frequency. Pierce's exceptional skills as a teacher, as well as his many influential publications and inventions, earned him credit for building the scientific foundations of electrical communication. Among his accomplishments are the invention of a method for recording sound on film and work with nickel and nichrome for the underwater signaling and submarine detection systems that became known as sonar. One of Pierce's most dominant characteristics was his 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. His independence was a habit of mind that he seems to have formed before he left the Lone Star State, along with the ability to drive a hard bargain over anything of monetary value. 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, foreshadowing many of the battles over intellectual property that challenge universities today. Yet, when fellow scientists called upon his expertise, Pierce gave it freely and without charge. To scientists, he was open, hospitable, and generous in sharing technical details that would help them in purely scientific investigations. But to corporations, he released valuable information only after receiving what he regarded as fair remuneration. Unlike many academics of his era, Pierce insisted that the industry pay for the privilege of using his patented ideas. After Pierce retired in 1940, he continued to pursue profitable activities relating to his patent holdings. Fatigued by these legal battles and no longer at the cutting edge of technology, he ended his career by pursuing science the way modern science began: as a leisure activity undertaken for the sake of pure knowledge. Well supplied with funds, he built a small laboratory on his New Hampshire estate to carry on research about sound-emitting insects, a subject that now attracted his restless energies. He was fascinated by katydids, crickets, cicadas, and other noisemaking insects that populated the New England fields in the summertime. In 1948 he published The Songs of Insects (Harvard University Press), which was inspired by his study of sonic vibrations. George W. Pierce died at his home in New Hampshire on August 25, 1956, at the age of 84. Through his pioneering efforts in radio engineering and underwater acoustics, Pierce had brought distinction to Harvard, to his undergraduate alma mater--The University of Texas at Austin, and to his native state. 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 a Texas boy whose first job was watering mules with a leaky bucket. Margaret J. Barker (M.A. English '01), Narration for the TxTell video about George W. Pierce, written and performed by Karl D. Stephan: "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, rolling a two-wheeled cart out on the porch of an outbuilding. He eases the cart off the perch 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 and 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." Click here to read "A Texan at Harvard: Did Success Spoil G.W. Pierce?," by Karl D. Stephan (PhD engineering '83)
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