IEEE Spectrum September, 2015 - 43

work, composed in about 1950, he wrote: article about microwave-tube develop"It is of interest to note that the opera- ment that would refer to Haeff's "use of
tion of the recently announced 'revolu- traveling waves with electron beams
tionary' device known as the 'Travelling back around 1935." But Pierce, who
Wave Tube,' is based on the principle died in 2002, never did author an artifirst disclosed by me in my patents No. cle setting the historical record straight.
2,064,469 and 2,233,126 which describe And only a few specialists realized the
the fundamental ideas of the travelling importance of Haeff's early work, like
wave tube." But he did little beyond that Victor Granatstein at the University of
to associate himself with this remarkable Maryland, who wrote in 2000 that Haeff
device, which was to become immensely "made an indispensible contribution
important after John R. Pierce brought to the development of the helix TWT"
the concept of the traveling-wave tube (traveling-wave tube), noting that the
to Bell Labs, archrival of RCA, soon after "key" idea of using a helix to slow a highmeeting Kompfner in Britain in 1944. In frequency wave to the same speed as an
1951, Kompfner himself joined Bell Labs electron beam was "revealed for the first
time in Andrew Haeff's patent."
as Pierce's protégé.
Pierce, an engineer who is perhaps most
famous now for coining the word transisn 1950 Haeff, who had
tor in 1948, rose to become an executive
left RCA in 1941 to work
director at Bell Labs. And his relationship
on r ad a r at t he U. S.
with Haeff was cordial enough for him
Naval Research Laborato have dined at the Haeff home on one
tory, joined the research
occasion in the early 1950s. Nevertheless, and development laboratories of the
Pierce relentlessly pressed Kompfner's- rapidly expanding Hughes Aircraft Co.

BoTTom, lefT: u.s. PATenT And TrAdemArk office; riGhT: uk PATenT office

and, indirectly, Bell Labs'-claim to priority. He wrote in 1956: "About the origin
of the traveling-wave tube, I will say only
that it was invented in England during
the war by an Austrian architect, Rudolf
Kompfner, who had always wanted to
be a physicist."
Pierce's definitive 1950 textbook
Traveling-Wave Tubes did not so much as
mention Haeff's contribution. In Europe,
on the other hand, Haeff's early work
on the traveling-wave tube featured in
a French textbook, published in 1951.
Ten years later, Pierce told Haeff in a
letter of his plans to write a historical

in Culver City, Calif. There he set up
and directed the Hughes Electron Tube
Laboratory, eventually becoming a vice
president of Hughes and director of
research. Haeff's lab quickly began
developing advanced versions of the
traveling-wave tube.
The launch of the Russian Sputnik
satellite in October 1957 gave him even
more impetus for doing so, as communication via satellite became the new
frontier for radio and TV engineers.
Researchers at Bell Labs proposed
launching an orbiting relay station
and using a network of ground-based

stations to track it continuously as it
moved across the sky. In a 1945 issue
of Wireless World, the science fiction
writer Arthur C. Clarke had described
his idea of placing communications
satellites in stationary orbits, which
would avoid the tracking problems associated with satellites that move relative to Earth's surface. When Hughes
engineer Harold Rosen suggested that
the company develop such a stationary
satellite, many of his colleagues were
skeptical, but Haeff convinced the general manager, Lawrence "Pat" Hyland,
that a stationary satellite was preferable to the Bell Labs scheme.
Haeff established a special task force to
study the problems of commercial satellite communication. In October 1959 the
task force recommended that Hughes
proceed at lightning pace with a "major
space program...under tight security."
The aim was to place a simple broadband
repeater satellite into an approximately
stationary orbit above the Atlantic.
The task force further advocated
developing a special lightweight, highefficiency traveling-wave tube, weighing
around 1 pound-about one-twentieth
the weight of Hughes's standard version. This tube would form "the heart
of the proposed satellite electronic system," amplifying the signals the satellite
picked up before relaying them back to
Earth at a different frequency.
Hughes's Syncom became the world's
first geosynchronous communications satellite, successfully reaching orbit in 1963.
This launch was just a NASA-sponsored
test, but it soon gave rise to the first commercial communications satellite, placed
in orbit in 1965, the Syncom-based Early
Bird, also known as Intelsat I. Early Bird's
success ultimately allowed Hughes to
dominate the manufacture of communications satellites for many years to come.
It must have been an occasion for pride-
and some mixed feelings-for Haeff when
the device he pioneered in his twenties, one rarely associated with his own
name, successfully carried a multitude
of human voices across space. n
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Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of IEEE Spectrum September, 2015