Overview

Phillip Hagar Smith was born in Lexington, Massachusetts on April 29, 1905, to George and Rose Whitney Smith of Scotch and English ancestry. Rose Whitney was a descendant of Eli Whitney, the inventor of the cotton gin. While attending Tufts College, Phil was an active amateur radio operator with the call sign 1ANB. He also played the cornet in the Tufts College band. To commute between Lexington and Tufts, he drove a reconstructed model T Ford and later a 4 cylinder Harley Davidson motorcycle. He received the BSEE degree from Tufts College (now Tufts University) in 1928, majoring in electrical communications.

In 1928 he joined the technical staff of Bell Telephone Laboratories with the Radio Research Department, Deal, NJ where he worked under J.C. Schelleng and E.J. Sterba. In these early days, Phil became involved in the design and installation of directional antenna equipment for commercial AM radio broadcasting. In 1929 he was working in Lawrenceville, NJ, on an antenna system which was designed to communicate by shortwave with Europe and South America. The antenna was connected to the transmitter by a two wire transmission line. Perhaps the major reference at the time was J.A. Fleming's 1911 telephone equation, which expressed the impedance characteristics of high frequency transmission lines in terms of measurable effects of electro-magnetic waves propagating theron, i.e, the standing wave amplitude and the wave position.

In the reprint of an article entitled "Transmission Lines for Shortwave Radio Systems," presented at the IRE 20th anniversary convention in...