Dr. George A. Campbell

the first of ONand unusuallyDecember next, afterasthirty-eight years of active productive service 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 concerning 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.