"Research is the effort of the mind to comprehend relationships which no one has previously known, and in its finest exemplification it is practical as well as theoretical, trending always toward worthwhile relationships, demanding common sense as well as uncommon ability."

-- H. D. Arnold, 1925, first research director at Bell Labs

Bell System Technical Journal Paper Directory

Thirtieth Anniversary

Volume XXXI, July 1952, Number 4

Lee de Forest and William Shockley Discuss Electronics

Lee de Forest and William Shockley Discuss Electronics

Thirty years ago this month the Bell System Technical Journal began publication. Suggested by Dr. George A. Campbell, it had been under discussion for some years. Dr. R. W. King, who had been one of its most active advocates, became its editor when the staff of the Journal was established. Except for a six-year period following 1928, while he was in England, Dr. King continued as editor until he retired in 1949.

By July, 1922, when No. 1, Vol. 1 of the Journal appeared, research and development was a long established practice in the Bell System. The high-vacuum electronic tube, which had already begun to revolutionize electrical communication, was itself a product of Bell System research. Since electrical communication was a still comparatively new field of study, however, its publications were widely scattered. There seemed a need for a magazine that would serve the communication engineers exclusively, and it was largely to meet this need that the Bell System Technical Journal was launched.

In the thirty years since that time, the art and science of communication has advanced and ramified beyond anything likely to have been then foreseen. A very substantial part of this increase has originated within the Bell System, and this progress has been reflected in the pages of the Technical Journal. There seems little reason to doubt that the next three decades will witness an advance at least comparable with that of the past three, and it is planned to have the Journal present the work of the coming years, with perhaps even greater effectiveness than in the past. Abstracts or titles of all Bell System technical and scientific papers appearing in other publications are listed in the Journal and reprints of many of these papers are available and may be obtained by subscribers. In one way or another, therefore, Journal readers have access to essentially all the technical papers published in the Bell Svstem. With this increased coverage, it is hoped that the Journal will prove increasingly useful to a growing circle of readers.