Description of work Bell Telephone Laboratories

from the resume of:
Phillips V. Bradford, Sc.D.

Description of work at Bell Telephone Laboratories

I was hired as a Member of Technical Staff at Bell Telephone Laboratories (BTL) prior to finishing the final publication of my doctoral dissertation and award of my Sc.D. degree from Columbia University. At that time (1967) BTL was jointly owned by AT&T and Western Electric Corp. It was considered by many as the premier corporate research laboratory in the entire world.

This was before AT&T underwent the divestitures of the Regional Bell Operating Companies (RBOCs - or "Baby Bells"), prior to the fissure of BTL into BelCore, and certainly prior to BTL's recent reorganization into Lucent, Inc. The Crawford Hill Laboratory where I worked is one of the finest antenna instrumentation laboratories in the world.

My assignments

In my position I was asked to divide my time between two projects: First was satellite antenna engineering work, which was in the critical business mission path of AT&T which had recently launched into Earth orbit the first commercial communications satellite, TELSTAR. For this work I reported to Mr. Art Crawford, who was the inventor of the "horn reflector" antenna, some of which are still seen atop many telephone buildings for microwave communications. My second assignment was to work as an assistant to the now famous radio astronomy team of Dr. Arno Penzias and Dr. Robert W. Wilson in some of their measurements of background radiation of the night sky, using a large horn reflector antenna. This latter project later became important in the study of fundamental physics and cosmology but had some rationale for BTL in understanding the background noise limits of microwave radiation in space.

The following reports describe the nature of the engineering work that I completed.

"Factors Determining the Feed Configuration for a Multiple Beam Satellite Antenna", by P.V. Bradford, Internal Memorandum, Bell Telephone Laboratories, Crawford Hill Labs, April 1, 1969.
"Circular Corregated Antenna Feeds", by P.V. Bradford, Memorandum for Record, Bell Telephone Laboratories, Crawford Hill Labs, March 27, 1969.
"Fourier Series Representation for Tracking Inclined, Elliptical, Synchronous Satellite Orbits", by P.V. Bradford and R.W. Wilson, Internal Memorandum, Bell Telephone Laboratories, Crawford Hill Labs, February 28, 1969.

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