Today in Technology History

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December 19

An electrical engineer who made important contributions to anti-radar technology died exactly two decades ago.

Frederick Emmons Terman was born in 1900 in Indiana. His father, a psychologist at Stanford University, had created the famous Stanford-Binet IQ test that was for many years the standard intelligence test in the English-speaking world. Thanks to his father's unconventional views about intelligence and education, Terman didn't enter school until the age of nine -- but that late start didn't impede his academic career, which brought him degrees in chemical and electrical engineering from Stanford, and eventually a doctorate from M.I.T.

After recovering from tuberculosis, Terman took a teaching position at Stanford, becoming the school's first professor of electronics. Among his students were William Hewlett and David Packard, founders of the high-tech firm Hewlett-Packard. By the late 1930s, Terman was in charge of Stanford's electrical engineering department.

That department made some remarkable technical innovations related to radar, which was one reason Terman was asked to head the U.S. government's secret Radio Research Laboratory at Harvard University during the Second World War.

During the war, Terman's team of scientists developed 150 anti-radar techniques, including "chaff": thin strips of reflective foil released by airplanes to trick enemy radar. They also found ways to snoop on and jam enemy radar signals. All these countermeasures greatly reduced the effectiveness of German antiaircraft efforts, and after the war Terman was honored with medals from both the U.S. and Britain.

Terman spent the rest of his career back at Stanford -- first as dean of engineering and later as provost, vice president, and acting president. More than any other individual, he was responsible for building Stanford into the high-tech mecca that it is today. He retired in 1965, and died on December 19, 1982.

Related links:

• Click here to read a longer biographical sketch of Terman.

• Another reason Terman was selected for the job of heading the wartime Radio Research Laboratory was that the person who picked him for the job -- Vannevar Bush, the man in charge of organizing America's scientists during the war -- happened to be Terman's doctoral advisor at M.I.T. We wrote about Bush last year.

• Click here to read more about Terman's relationship with Hewlett and Packard.

• Interestingly, Terman and his father were both members of the National Academy of Sciences at the same time.

 

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