Edmond Bruce (September 28, 1899 – November 28, 1973) was an American radio pioneer best known for creating the

rhombic antenna A rhombic antenna is made of four sections of wire suspended parallel to the ground in a diamond or "rhombus" shape. Each of the four sides is the same length – about a quarter-wavelength to one wavelength per section – converging but not to ...

and Bruce array. Bruce was born in Saint Louis, Missouri, and raised in

Cambridge, Massachusetts Cambridge ( ) is a city in Middlesex County, Massachusetts, United States. As part of the Boston metropolitan area, the cities population of the 2020 U.S. census was 118,403, making it the fourth most populous city in the state, behind Boston ...

Brooklyn Brooklyn () is a borough of New York City, coextensive with Kings County, in the U.S. state of New York. Kings County is the most populous county in the State of New York, and the second-most densely populated county in the United States, be ...

, and

Washington, D.C. ) , image_skyline = , image_caption = Clockwise from top left: the Washington Monument and Lincoln Memorial on the National Mall, United States Capitol, Logan Circle, Jefferson Memorial, White House, Adams Morgan, ...

In 1917 he left high school to join the Navy and was eventually chief radio electrician in the transatlantic communication service, serving at the Otter Cliffs Radio Station in

Bar Harbor Bar Harbor is a resort town on Mount Desert Island in Hancock County, Maine, United States. As of the 2020 census, its population is 5,089. During the summer and fall seasons, it is a popular tourist destination and, until a catastrophic fire ...

Maine Maine () is a state in the New England and Northeastern regions of the United States. It borders New Hampshire to the west, the Gulf of Maine to the southeast, and the Canadian provinces of New Brunswick and Quebec to the northeast and ...

. He then studied at

George Washington University The George Washington University (GW or GWU) is a Private university, private University charter#Federal, federally chartered research university in Washington, D.C. Chartered in 1821 by the United States Congress, GWU is the largest Higher educat ...

, 1919, and at

Massachusetts Institute of Technology The Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) is a private land-grant research university in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Established in 1861, MIT has played a key role in the development of modern technology and science, and is one of the ...

, 1920–1924, from which he received his bachelor's degree in electrical communication. From 1921 to 1923 he also worked for Melville Eastham's Clapp-Eastham Company. In 1924 he joined the

Western Electric Company The Western Electric Company was an American electrical engineering and manufacturing company officially founded in 1869. A wholly owned subsidiary of American Telephone & Telegraph for most of its lifespan, it served as the primary equipment m ...

, and in 1925 became a research engineer at

Bell Telephone Laboratories Nokia Bell Labs, originally named Bell Telephone Laboratories (1925–1984), then AT&T Bell Laboratories (1984–1996) and Bell Labs Innovations (1996–2007), is an American industrial research and scientific development company owned by mult ...

, where he helped develop

short-wave radio Shortwave radio is radio transmission using shortwave (SW) radio frequencies. There is no official definition of the band, but the range always includes all of the high frequency band (HF), which extends from 3 to 30 MHz (100 to 10 m ...

receivers and field strength measuring equipment, and designed directional antennas for short-wave radio communication, including his celebrated

(1931).

Karl Jansky Karl Guthe Jansky (October 22, 1905 – February 14, 1950) was an American physicist and radio engineer who in April 1933 first announced his discovery of radio waves emanating from the Milky Way in the constellation Sagittarius. He is considere ...

used a steerable Bruce array in his earliest

radio astronomy Radio astronomy is a subfield of astronomy that studies celestial objects at radio frequencies. The first detection of radio waves from an astronomical object was in 1933, when Karl Jansky at Bell Telephone Laboratories reported radiation comin ...

experiments, also in 1931. Bruce received the 1932

IEEE Morris N. Liebmann Memorial Award The initially called Morris Liebmann Memorial Prize provided by the Institute of Radio Engineers (IRE), the IEEE Morris N. Liebmann Memorial Award was created in 1919 in honor of Colonel Morris N. Liebmann. It was initially given to awardees who h ...

"for his theoretical investigations and field developments in the domain of directional antennas", and the

Franklin Institute The Franklin Institute is a science museum and the center of science education and research in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. It is named after the American scientist and statesman Benjamin Franklin. It houses the Benjamin Franklin National Memori ...

's 1935 Longstreth Award for inventing the

Patents

Patent 2,285,565

Selected works

* Bruce, E., Beck, A.C., Lowry, L.R., "Horizontal Rhombic Antennas", Proceedings of the IRE, volume 23, issue 1, Jan. 1935, pages 24–46.

References

Proceedings of the IRE, 1932

Author biograph, Proceedings of the Institute of Radio Engineers, Volume 23, Number 1. January 1935.

Genealogical record
{{DEFAULTSORT:Bruce, Edmond Radio pioneers Scientists at Bell Labs 1973 deaths 1899 births