[Milsurplus] Fwd: Base Carrier Current ( Milsurplus Vol 132, Issue 4 )

Fri Apr 10 23:12:52 EDT 2015

we also have  books  by  this  fellow...  a whole  group of them!

but look at this!

http://www.uh.edu/engines/epi1355.htm

 GEORGE SQUIRE  
_by John H. Lienhard_ (http://www.uh.edu/engines/jhlbio.htm)  
_Click here  for audio of Episode 1355._ 
(http://www.kuhf.org/programaudio/engines/eng1355_64k.m3u)  

Today, a story about altruism and Muzak. The University of Houston's  
College of Engineering presents this series about the machines that make our  
civilization run, and the people whose ingenuity created them. 
When I was assigned to work on communications  equipment at Fort Monmouth's 
Squire Lab in 1954, I vaguely wondered who Squire  was. Now, 44 years 
later, I open Invention and Technology magazine and find a 1925 photo of  General 
George Squire, with a bowler hat, celluloid collar, and pince-nez,  
glowering at the photographer. Squire, it seems, was frowning over a long  legal 
battle with AT&T. 
Squire was born in 1865. He went to West Point, then devoted his life to  
science, engineering and the Signal Corps. He worked on electric tracking of  
projectiles and was an early proponent of flight. He was almost alone in  
supporting Goddard's rocket experiments. Squire was far more interested in  
science than war. A 1905 War Department memo said he seemed to have "no 
relish  for line duties." Of his personal life we know next to nothing. Indeed, 
he  worked with such intensity we wonder if he had a personal life. 
For forty years he pioneered communication systems, especially  
wire-wireless systems. That meant superimposing high-frequency radio signals  on 
low-frequency telegraph lines. That way, radio signals could be sent out  without 
being broadcast  to local receivers. The wires, unlike telephone wires, 
didn't have to be  insulated. And the high frequency didn't interfere with 
telegraph signals. It  was an important and revolutionary idea that's used in 
many ways today. 
Squire did a surprising thing with his patent. The 1883 patent law let him  
assign it to the government so that any American citizen who wanted to 
could  use it. When he did that, he misjudged the forces of avarice. His patent 
was  immediately put to use by AT&T. 
Then, to gain exclusive control, AT&T claimed Squire had infringed on  
their earlier patents. Squire had tried to share his discovery, and now he  
found it monopolized. He took AT&T to court (hence that grim 1925 photo).  It 
was a legal battle he couldn't win, but as it ground on he found a new use  
for the technology: 
In 1915 Edison had tried putting a phonograph in a cigar factory to improve 
 production (I wonder if he played Carmen!) It seemed to  work, and in 1922 
Squire found that he could send radio music over power  lines. He formed a 
company called Wired Radio and began selling canned music  to businesses -- 
especially hotels and restaurants. He arbitrarily combined  the words 
musicand Kodak to get the catchy word Muzak. But AT&T also liked  that idea, and 
they eventually gained control of it as well. 
In the end, Squire retired to a large Michigan farm, which he freely opened 
 up to the public for hunting, golf, and fishing. He took in 60,000 
visitors a  year. His generosity, which was beaten in the courts, finally found 
expression  in this odd open-handed gesture. 
Of course Muzak on elevators is hard to love. We listen to Public Radio  
because we want better. Still, Muzak is emblematic of Squire's recurring  
impulse to give something away to all of us. 
I'm John Lienhard, at the University of Houston, where we're interested in  
the way inventive minds work. (Theme music)

____________________________________
Lindsay, D., The Muzak Man. American Heritage of Invention  & Technology, 
Vol. 14, No. 2, Fall 1998, pp. 52-57.

Thirteen years after  Squire first used telegraph lines for radio, the 1923
Wonder Book of  Knowledge still talks about  using secret codes to protect
the secrecy of military information being  broadcast over radio telephones.

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In a message dated 4/10/2015 6:17:05 P.M. US Mountain Standard Time,  
jhhaynes at earthlink.net writes:

Something paradoxical about all this is that today people use  cable and
satellites and the Internet to receive huge bandwidth things like  movies
and TV.  But AM broadcast is still there with its 10 KHz  bandwidth
spewing all day and night and I don't know anybody who listens to  it.
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