Scanning the Past

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

Submitted by Dick Reiman, Historian

Herbert J. Reich

Fifty years ago this month, the PROCEEDINGS (then the PROCEEDINGS OF THE IRE) included a paper by Herbert J. Reich on vacuum tubes used as variable reactance elements. At the time Reich was a professor of electrical engineering at the University of Illinois. In his paper, Reich noted that reactance tubes had been used for the past few years for automatic tuning and frequency modulation. He thought, however, that there had not been published a general discussion of reactance tubes, and he anticipated that his paper might suggest new applications. He included circuit diagrams and derived equations to show how a vacuum tube with suitable circuit elements could serve as a variable capacitive or inductive reactance. A typical circuit used feedback to produce a plate current which was approximately 90 degrees out of phase with the plate voltage. A variation in the voltage applied to the tube grid could produce a substantial variation in the effective reactance and could, for example, change the frequency of a local oscillator in a radio receiver .

Reich was born in 1900 in Staten Island, New York, and graduated in mechanical engineering from Cornell University in 1924. He received a Ph.D. in physics from Cornell in 1928 and taught electrical engineering at the University of Illinois from 1929 to 1944. In 1944 he joined the Radio Research Laboratory at Harvard University and worked there until 1946. This was a laboratory directed by Frederick E. Terman where electronic countermeasures systems were developed. In 1946, Reith became a professor of electrical engineering at Yale University where he taught until 1969.

Reich was the author or coauthor of a number of books on electronics and microwaves, including Theory and Applications of Electron Tubes (1939), Principles of Electron Tubes (1941), Ultra-High Frequency Techniques (1942), Microwave Theory and Techniques (1953), and Microwave Principles (1957). He also authored more than 60 technical papers, including 16 in the PROCEEDINGS. In 1987, Professor Reich provided me with a list of his publications. In an accompanying letter he expressed regret that he had not submitted to the PROCEEDINGS an article in which he proposed the use of 450 kHz instead of 60 kHz as the intermediate frequency, "in order to avoid whistles and squeals in the output of heterodyne receivers." The article instead was published as a series in Radio News during 1928. He mentioned also a 1927 paper, coauthored with Frederick Bedell, on a stabilized cathode-ray oscilloscope. Reich recalled that he had been a graduate student at Cornell at the time and had not fully appreciated the importance of the instrument. He stated that he "was therefore willing to relinquish my patent rights for $100!" He later received patents on magnetrons and reflex klystrons. He published several papers on cathode-follower amplifiers, thyratrons, and electronic power converters.

Reich was elected a Fellow of the Institute of Radio Engineers (IRE) in 1949 and a Fellow of the American Institute of Electrical Engineers (AIEE) in 1954. He was the Director of the IRE in 1944 and from 1948 to 1957. He served on at least seven IRE committees and was editor of the IRE TRANSACTIONS ON ELECTRON DEVICES from 1952 to 1954. He also served on the International Electrotechnical Commission from 1960 to 1972.

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