Scanning the Past: A History of Electrical Engineering from the Past

Submitted by Dick Reiman, Historian

Copyright 1993 IEEE. Reprinted with permission from the IEEE publication, "Scanning the Past" which covers a reprint of an article appearing in the Proceedings of the IEEE Vol. 81, No. 3, March 1993.

Louis W. Austin

Sixty-five years ago this month, the PROCEEDINGS OF THE INSTITUTE OF RADIO ENGINEERS (IRE) included a paper by Louis W. Austin in which he discussed recent investigations of radio wave propagation carried out in several countries. At the time he was serving as Chairman of the Commission on Radio Wave Propagation of the International Union of Scientific Radio Telegraphy. As a long-time employee of the Bureau of Standards in Washington , D.C. , he was a frequent contributor to the PROCEEDINGS, publishing 40 technical papers in its pages between 1913 and 1932.

In his March 1928 paper, Austin noted that propagation theory had been advanced greatly during the 1920s. For example, he explained that theory now took into account the effect of the earth' s magnetic field on the phase velocity of waves in the ionosphere. He also addressed the problem of measurement discrepancies resulting from field strength measurements being done in different locations by different people. He had tried to address this problem by doing intercomparisons of instruments used at the Bureau of Standards with those at the Bell Telephone Laboratories and the Radio Corporation of America . Austin reported on long-wave propagation data collected by researchers in France and Great Britain as well as the United States . He commented on the effect of solar activity on transatlantic radio and stated that he had used Bureau of Standards data accumulated since 1915 to establish correlation with the 11-year sunspot cycle. He mentioned some recent experiments using a radio echo effect to obtain information on the height of ionized layers.

Austin was born in Vermont in 1867 and graduated from Middlebury College in 1889. He continued his education in Germany where he received a Ph.D. from Strasbourg University in 1893. He taught physics at the University of Wisconsin from 1893 to 1901 and then returned to Germany , where he worked for two years at a laboratory in Berlin doing research on the properties of gases at high temperatures.

In 1904 Austin joined the Bureau of Standards, where he began the radio propagation studies that were to occupy him for the rest of his life. The U.S. Navy established a radio laboratory at the Bureau of Standards, and Austin headed it from 1908 to 1923. With a colleague, Louis Cohen, he developed what became known as the Austin-Cohen formula for predicting the strength of radio waves. Data collected during 1910 from Navy ships crossing the Atlantic provided the basis for the formula.

Austin joined the IRE in 1913 and served as the third president of the Institute in 1914. He received the IRE Medal of Honor in 1927. He served as a U .S. representative at numerous international conferences on radio and became director of a special radio laboratory at the Bureau of Standards in 1923.

Austin was described by colleagues as being "warm-hearted, modest, and quiet." As he entered a hospital for surgery just before his death, he wrote a note asking that his program of radio measurements be continued in the event that "things should not go well." Lyman I. Briggs who wrote an obituary of Austin for Science assured readers that his work was being continued. Austin died in Washington , D.C. , in 1932.

James E. Brittain
School of History , Technology, and Society
Georgia Institute of Technology