The Bell System Technical Journal 



Vol XIV October, 1935 No. 4 



Dr. George A. Campbell 



By F. B. JEWETT 



/^N the first of December next, after thirty -eight years of active 

 ^^ and unusually productive service as a mathematical physicist 

 and inventor, Dr. George A. Campbell retires from active membership 

 on the staff of the Bell Telephone Laboratories. 



As the history of an art can often be written most effectively in terms 

 of the personalities who have been responsible for its upbuilding, I feel 

 that I am not departing from the objectives of the Bell System Technical 

 Journal in bringing to the attention of its readers a brief note con- 

 cerning one of the chief artificers of telephone transmission. Dr. 

 Campbell's achievements in this field entitle him beyond question to 

 rank first among his generation of theoretical workers in electrical 

 communication. Yet, in common with many truly great minds, it has 

 been his nature to avoid publicity, so that outside the circle of his 

 immediate associates and a few of the more mathematically gifted 

 students of his chosen branch of electrical science, his fame is far from 

 being commensurate with his achievements. 



In 1897, thirty-eight years ago, the art of telephone transmission was 

 in its infancy. Circuits of even a few hundred miles' length were rare, 

 and the longest distance over which communication had been held was 

 that separating New York and Chicago. It was at this time that 

 Campbell, as a young man, after graduating from Massachusetts 

 Institute of Technology and spending four years in graduate study at 

 Harvard, Gottingen, Vienna and Paris, joined the staff of the American 

 Telephone and Telegraph Company to engage in research. Familiar 

 with the work of Rayleigh and Heaviside, Campbell's early studies 

 sought some method of mitigating the attenuation, which levied heavy 

 toll upon the voice currents and formed a theretofore unyielding 

 barrier against telephone communication over very long distances. 



Heaviside had suggested that inductance, if properly applied in a 



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