Taylor, Albert Hoyt

SUBJECT AREA: Electronics and information technology, Telecommunications

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b. 1 January 1874 Chicago, Illinois, USA

d. 11 December 1961 Claremont, California, USA

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American radio engineer whose work on radio-detection helped lay the foundations for radar.

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Taylor gained his degree in engineering from Northwest University, Evanston, Illinois, then spent a time at the University of Gottingen. On his return to the USA he taught successively at Michigan State University, at Lansing, and at the universities of Wisconsin at Madison and North Dakota at Grand Forks. From 1923 until 1945 he supervised the Radio Division at the US Naval Research Laboratories. There he carried out studies of short-wave radio propagation and confirmed Heaviside's 1925 theory of the reflection characteristics of the ionosphere. In the 1920s and 1930s he investigated radio echoes, and in 1933, with L.C.Young and L.A.Hyland, he filed a patent for a system of radio-detection that contributed to the subsequent development of radar.

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Principal Honours and Distinctions

Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers Morris N.Liebmann Memorial Award 1927. President, Institute of Radio Engineers 1929. Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers Medal of Honour 1942.

Bibliography

1926, with E.O.Hulbert, "The propagation of radio waves over the earth", Physical Review 27:189.

1936, "The measurement of RF power", Proceedings of the Institute of Radio Engineers 24: 1,342.

Further Reading

S.S.Swords, 1986, Technical History of the Beginnings of Radar, London: Peter Peregrinus.

See also: Watson-Watt, Sir Robert Alexander

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