George A. Campbell, 1870 - 1954

George A. Campbell, 1870-1954 The passing of Dr. George Ashley Campbell November 10, 1954, marks the close of an era that has seen the communication art grow from infancy to robust manhood The problems of telephone transmission were little understood when l 2 T H E B E L L SYSTEM T E C H N I C A L J O U R N A L , J A N U A R Y 1955 George Campbell, a young mathematical physicist joined the American Bell Telephone Company (later American Telephone and Telegraph Company) in 1897. He had just returned from four years of stud}'- at various universities in Paris, Vienna, and Gottingen, having received his B.S. degree in 1891 from Massachusetts Institute of Technology, A.B. from Harvard, 1892, and M.A. in 1893 from the same institution. In these early years at American Bell, he also continued his studies at Harvard, where in 1901, he received the Ph.D. degree. Familiar with the work of Rayleigh and Heaviside, Campbell's first undertaking was to find some method of mitigating the attenuation of voice currents in telephone lines, which theretofore, produced a barrier against telephone communication over very long distances. Heaviside had shown that inductance, if properly applied in a long telephone circuit, should diminish rather than increase the attenutation. Campbell followed this suggestion and developed a theory of "loading," but there occurred one of those rare coincidences in the history of science of two independent investigators arriving at substantially the same result at the same time.