Oral-History:Bruce Barrow
About Bruce Barrow
Bruce B. Barrow is an IEEE Life Fellow and a founding member of the IRE Benelux Section and a founder of the Benelux Section in Region 8. He was elevated to IEEE Fellow in 1970 “for contributions to the field of standardization and to communication theory and practice.”
Barrow earned a B.S. and M.S. in EE from Carnegie Institute of Technology, in 1950, where he was a George Westing House Scholar; an EE from M.I.T., in 1956 (Tau Beta Pi Fellow); and a Ph.D., cum laude, from the Technological University, Delft, the Netherlands, in 1962, where he was a Fulbright Scholar. He also attended the Advanced Management Program at the Harvard Graduate School of Business Administration (1971).
Barrow spent his career in electronics engineering in communication systems and theory, performing important original research on data transmission over fading radio channels. He is recognized for his work in tropospheric scatter and tropospheric remote sensing. He is the principal co-author of the first IEEE standard on metric practice (IEEE Spectrum, March 1966) and published articles about the metric system and weights and measures. He served on metric practice committees of ASTM, SAE, American Welding Society, NFPA, and the Canadian Standards Association; and as Technical Advisor to ISTO Technical Committee 12 and IEC Technical Committee 25. He is the recipient of many awards, including the IEEE Charles Proteus Steinmetz Award (1987) ‘for outstanding leadership in national and international electrical and electronic standardization activities; the IEEE Centennial Medal (1984), the IEEE Third Millenium Medal (2000), and the IEEE-SA Standards Medallion (2016).
In 1959, Barrow initiated the petition to establish the Benelux Section of the IRE, the first IRE Section in Europe and served as Secretary Treasurer. In 1960, he organized the IRE Conference on Data Transmission in Delft, Netherlands, the first data transmission conference and the first international IRE conference outside North America. He has held volunteer posts at IEEE, including Secretary Treasure of the IRE Benelux Section in 1959, Vice-Chairman of IEEE Technical Activities Board (1973); Chair, Boston Section; Chair, Standards Board, and Member, IEEE Board of Directors.
About the Interview
BRUCE BARROW: An Interview Conducted by Sheldon Hochheiser, IEEE History Center, 22 November 2013
Interview #645 for the IEEE History Center, The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, Inc.
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Bruce Barrow, an oral history conducted in 2013 by Sheldon Hochheiser, IEEE History Center, Piscataway, NJ, USA.
Interview
INTERVIEWEE:
Bruce Barrow
INTERVIEWER: Sheldon Hochheiser
DATE: 22 November 2013
PLACE: IEEE History Center, New Brunswick, NJ
Early life and education, Carnegie, MIT
Hochheiser:
This is Sheldon Hochheiser of the IEEE History Center. It is November 22nd, 2013, and I am here at the History Center in New Brunswick, New Jersey with Bruce Barrow. Good afternoon, Bruce.
Barrow:
Good afternoon, Sheldon.
Hochheiser:
Perhaps we can start at the beginning. Where were you born and raised?
Barrow:
[Chuckles] I was born in Pennsylvania in a hospital, but I was raised in a little town called Ringtown, Pennsylvania. It is a small farming village, a nice little valley north of the hard coal region.
Hochheiser:
You are up in the Scranton/Wilkes-Barre area.
Barrow:
The hard coal regions being between Scranton/Wilkes-Barre and Harrisburg. It is in that area. The hard coal region has been a depressed area ever since our depression. This is more history than you need about that, but hard coal became an obsolete fuel after they put in oil pipelines and so on. That has been a depressed region, but the farming valley was very pleasant.
Anyhow, it was a very small school where I graduated. There were sixteen people in my graduating class. I had applied for scholarships at a couple of places, and I was accepted at Carnegie Institute of Technology with something called the George Westinghouse Scholarship. The Westinghouse Corporation named ten scholars each year and we got four years of tuition at Carnegie Institute of Technology. Now it is Carnegie Mellon University as I am sure you know. Four years of tuition, plus a summer job up at Westinghouse. This got me very thoroughly out of the little village where I had grown up because I was going to Pittsburgh, which was a long trip in those days. It is just ten, twelve hours by driving and so on and so forth. Distances were much longer in those days. I graduated high school in 1946. I was at Carnegie Tech from 1946 to 1950.
Hochheiser:
Now Carnegie Tech was very much a technical school at that time?
Barrow:
Only partly a technical school. They had Margaret Morrison Carnegie College, which was a college for women. Margaret Morrison being Andrew Carnage’s mother, so that was the name of that college. They had a very significant fine arts college, and still do. It was already a university in the sense that there were several colleges.
Hochheiser:
Did you go there because of your interests in science and technology?
Barrow:
Yes. Of course. Of course. I had decided that I wanted to be an engineer. I had not yet decided on a field. I had considered chemical engineering, but when I got there, I went into electrical engineering and had a very good time of it.
Hochheiser:
What was the curriculum in the electrical engineering program like at that time?
Barrow:
I should say since Pittsburgh was focused on Westinghouse, not since my scholarship was Westinghouse, but since Westinghouse was very important out there, they had a significant component in power engineering, transformers, and rotating machinery and so on. But I paid more attention to electronics. We had tetrodes and pentodes in those days. I took a general education, and I worked very hard. In four years, I completed my bachelor’s and my master’s degree in electrical engineering.
Hochheiser:
How did you manage to do that? A bachelor’s engineering curriculum is pretty rigorous by itself.
Barrow:
I worked my tail off, I guess. I took graduate courses, which you could do, and met all the requirements and got both [degrees]. I should mention, in passing, that this is when I was elected to Tau Beta Pi. In those days on our campus, Tau Beta Pi looked not only at your academic grades, but they also expected some evidence of broader extracurricular work. My major extracurricular work was the glee club. I had been a bit of a pianist and I was the accompanist of the glee club for most of those four years, which was quite a [chuckles] side experience. I can tell you that I soloed in Carnegie Hall, but that is not New York City. That is [chuckles] Carnegie Hall in Pittsburgh. It was a very fine experience and I do not need to go into that in length. But choral singing has been a life-long hobby of mine, and I sang in the choir, the symphonic choir when I was in Netherlands, and I still do it down in Washington D.C. Let us put that aside.
I graduated from Carnegie in 1950 and I received a Tau Beta Pi fellowship, which provided full tuition at MIT and a stipend, which I think was $120 a month.
Hochheiser:
But $120 a month went a whole lot farther in 1950. [Chuckles]
Barrow:
Yes. Indeed. It was possible to live on $120 a month in the grad house at MIT. I read these tales of college debt now that students acquire. Four years at Carnegie Tech, the four years was something under $2,000, the tuition was less than $500 a year at that time. So, yes, that went a long way.
Hochheiser:
Was there a student branch of either IRE or AIEE at Carnegie?
Barrow:
Yes, there was. I was not deeply involved. I became a student member of the AIEE. The head of my department was Richard Teare, and he, I believe you checked the records, was a president of AIEE.
Hochheiser:
He was the last president of AIEE.
Barrow:
If I can divert just a little bit here, because when I came back to the United States and we will get on to the IRE, IEEE history a little bit later, but when I came back to the United States, I did make a trip out there. He was the last president of AIEE. He asked me, and I had reason to go to Pittsburgh and I visited him. Now we are talking in the 1960s, and he asked me whether I thought that the merged society ought to have the name American in it. I said, no way, we really want to take a more non-national view. I am sure that my idea—I doubt very much if the IRE people would have agreed to that, I certainly was not part of the negotiations, but it had to be decided because it was the AIEE merging.
Hochheiser:
It was certainly one of the many things that had to be discussed.
Barrow:
I was a student member of the AIEE, and I abandoned that and became a student member of IRE some time while I was at MIT.
Hochheiser:
When you finished your two degrees at Carnegie you went directly to MIT?
Barrow:
I went directly to MIT. It turned out that it was a mixed blessing to have so much under my belt because I had almost completed the curriculum requirements at MIT and there I was on campus. I was not employed by one of the laboratories at that point, so I did not get into proper thesis material because I was just making decisions that were not great. I eventually worked at the Servomechanism Laboratory there. My first published papers came from that work.
One of my professors had just come back from a year abroad as a Fulbright professor, and the idea of a Fulbright scholarship appealed to me enormously, so I applied for one and I got one. I consciously chose to not go to England because I wanted to learn a foreign language, but I was afraid to go to Paris because I knew that there you would have to be totally articulate in French. For whatever reason, I think it was because one of my professors had been to the Netherlands, I am sure that was what, and it sounded like a good idea. So, I applied for and had a Fulbright scholarship at Delft [University of Technology].
Hochheiser:
Looking at the record, did not you work for a company called Hycon for a while?
Barrow:
That was later. That was after I left MIT.
Hochheiser:
When did you leave MIT?
Barrow:
Well, we are talking about two times in which I was in the Netherlands.
Hochheiser:
That is where I got confused. In 1952-1953, you left MIT on a Fulbright and went to the Netherlands.
Barrow:
I went to the Netherlands, and to Delft. I wanted to get immersed in the culture, so I lived with a family. I was not married. I lived with a family who were absolutely wonderful. They became foster parents to me. I digress a little bit because this is a long interview, I guess. I lived with a family, they adopted me, sort of, and I learned to speak Dutch. I do not speak it well, but I learned to speak Dutch.
This is after the war, so the presence [and] the memories of World War II were very, very obvious in 1952-1953 in the Netherlands because the Netherlands had been plastered badly by the Germans because they had the courage to resist. There were some other countries that just keeled over and resigned, but the Netherlands resisted. The Nazi government forced back, and they had a very bitter occupation.
The family that I stayed with, their grandmother lived next door and she had macular degeneration. One of the things that I did to learn the language is read the Diary of Anne Frank to her because she could not read. That was a wonderful thing for me to get acquainted with the language because Anne Frank was a teenager. Her vocabulary was not the vocabulary of the Amsterdam newspapers. It was a modest vocabulary, and that is a memory that just sticks with me.
Hochheiser:
Right.
Barrow:
That year went well. I gave a series of lectures at Delft. I was working on what we call stochastic processes; the business of applying statistics to random processes, processes that go on in time. Later, it became my thesis area, but that was much later. I gave a series of lectures at that time based on a paper by S. O. Rice [Stephen O. Rice] from Bell Laboratories. This was an area that was hot.
I have a friend [Henri G. Suyderhond] who was a student at Delft at the time and he remembers my lectures. He immigrated to the United States, and we still have contact with him. So, that was my first visit to the Netherlands.
Hochheiser:
That was 1952-1953?
Barrow:
1952-1953.
Hochheiser:
Then after that you went back to MIT?
Barrow:
That is exactly right. Now in 1953, I had my first visit to Paris. When I was in Paris, Queen Elizabeth was crowned, and some of my friends went to England. I did not. I was enjoying Paris. It was a very, very formative year for me. It was just a wonderful time. I came back to the United States and continued my work at MIT, but I did not at that time have the maturity to do good research that would satisfy the MIT requirements. In 1955, basically, they said, you know, I had passed my doctor requirements except not the thesis. I got a degree of electrical engineer from MIT, which much later in life I learned is called an ABD, all but dissertation. That is a well-known phrase.
Early IRE invovlement, Paris
Hochheiser:
Sorry. Now did you join IRE while you were--?
Barrow:
Some time at MIT. Yes. Your records could show when I became a student.
Hochheiser:
Yes. It lists 1952, I believe, while you were at MIT.
Barrow:
Sure. That would be about right.
Hochheiser:
Yes.
Barrow:
Then I left MIT and married my first wife [Trudie, Gertrude Bickerstaffe Barrow. I have only had two [and my second wife is Robin Rudd, Ph.D. She is a psychologist.] I married my] first wife in 1955. The year in Europe had been so formative for me, such a wonderful experience, that I wanted to take my wife to Europe. I wanted to go back to Europe. The company that I was working for, and I believe this was Hycon Eastern [Hycon Eastern, Inc.] at this time. The company that I took my job with coming out of MIT got a contract on tropospheric scatter. They got a contract to work in Europe and the company needed volunteers to put people on the ground for their contract. It took about ten minutes for me to raise my hand.
Hochheiser:
That is how you got back to Europe?
Barrow:
That is how I got back to Europe. We went to Paris, and I spent a year in Paris, which was very tough. [Chuckles]
Hochheiser:
[Laughs]
Barrow:
It was a wonderful time. That would be 1957-1958 that we were in Paris together. By this time, I was doing significant technical work in the field of tropospheric scatter. That was the project that took us [to Paris].
This is a Cold War project. At that time, telecommunications over a long distance were mostly ionospheric high frequencies. That is a miserable medium in terms of dependability. HAM radio operators used it then, and they still do a bit, but that is not important. The ionosphere was a major source; people were writing textbooks on the ionosphere and how to interpret it. The problem with high frequency ionospheric propagation is that it is very spotty. You are reflecting radio waves from the ionosphere and it comes and goes. It is variable as the day goes by. At a given time, I might be able to communicate from here to Brazil, but not communicate from here to Spain. I might be able to communicate from here to Moscow, but not from here to Spain at a particular time of day. It was a very capricious medium, but it is what people had, and it was better than mail. It did work.
The other way of radio communication was microwave line of sight, but line of sight is what the name suggests. You put up an antenna and if it is up on hills somewhere, you can get twenty miles, maybe thirty miles. The NATO forces [North Atlantic Treaty Organization], the SHAPE forces [Supreme Headquarters Allied Powers Europe] , the military forces of the western countries wanted to be able to communicate from Norway all the way around NATO countries to Turkey. They wanted it to be dependable.
The medium of tropospheric scatter came along. For tropospheric scatter you use large antennas, 28-feet, 60-feet in diameter, big parabolic antennas. You put in ten kilowatts of power, and you can go beyond the horizon by the process of troposphere scatter. You are scattering electrometric waves through the troposphere, which is the level that is as I understand above where weather occurs, but it is below the ionosphere, so it is there. Communicating beyond the horizon is very similar to when you see a thunderstorm you can see lightning flashes that are from beyond the horizon, because you can see lightning lighting up the sky and that is basically what tropospheric scatter does. It works on frequencies of 100 megahertz and on up.
Hochheiser:
You were working for Hycon and they sent you to NATO in Paris?
Barrow:
Hycon got the contract. The contractor was Le Matériel Téléphonique or LCT-LMT. It was the ITT affiliate in Paris. They had the contract. They were the prime contractors, and we were--
Hochheiser:
Hycon was the subcontractor?
Barrow:
Exactly.
Hochheiser:
You did that for?
Barrow:
Well, for one year, basically. I had a wonderful year in Paris, but that is sort of off the issue here, except we had a wonderful year in Paris.
When I was in Paris I got in touch with my professor at Delft and I said, look, this is what I am doing, does it make any sense for me to come and work on a doctor’s degree in the Netherlands. Professor Van Soest was his name. He was not only a professor at Delft, but he was also at an influential level in the Dutch government, which worked with the SHAPE Air Defense Technical Center, which was basically a research facility or a technical center facility that had been set up in the Netherlands to support the work of SHAPE. I ended up there. I worked there for four years and did finish my thesis.
Hochheiser:
At this point, did you then leave Hycon and work directly for SHAPE
Barrow:
Oh, yes.
Hochheiser:
I thought that was the case. You simultaneously were working for SHAPE and working on your dissertation?
Barrow:
That is right and that was the plan. I was going to work on a problem that they were interested in and, indeed, it was the same thing. It was tropospheric scatter, which SHAPE was responsible for implementing in that network.
Hochheiser:
Now were you more involved in IRE by the time you went back to Paris and then the Netherlands?
Barrow:
My memory is that I was a member.
Hochheiser:
Yes.
Benelux section
Hochheiser:
What was your level of engagement with IRE at this time?
Barrow:
That was when my level of engagement began. I was a member. I think I was a full member at that time. I do not think I was a student anymore. I was a full member. We were working in SHAPE and our common language was, of course, English, because there were people there from six, eight, ten of the NATO countries, which were working professionally. Somehow or other, the brainstorm hit me that, gee, you know, we do not have any way of sharing technical information. We have a dozen members of the IRE here at the technical center, so why don’t we have some meetings. This was the start of what became the Benelux [Belgium, Netherlands, and Luxembourg] section.
Hochheiser:
Started by you and meeting informally?
Barrow:
I do not know. I must have realized that sections existed. I had the idea, but obviously I could not do it. I sent off to the New York headquarters. I believe their headquarters was in New York at that time.
Hochheiser:
Yes.
Barrow:
I sent off to the New York headquarters and I asked for a list. I had talked with some of my friends there at SHAPE and for somehow or the other we had the idea for Benelux because we did not want to be directly in competition with the Dutch society. The idea occurred, so I sent out the letter asking for interest for the people who were members of the IRE in the three countries. My memory is that the total membership was less than one hundred and more than fifty. I sent out the letter and it resonated.
We got an enthusiastic response from engineer Herre Rinia, who was the director of the Philips Research Laboratory in Eindhoven, which was wonderful. He was very supportive from the very beginning. We immediately picked up interest from the gentleman who was the head of the PTT laboratory in Delft and C.B. Broersma who was the chief radio engineer for the Holland-America line. We had several people who said, “hey, this is a great idea,” and they jumped on and they supported it well to begin with. I remember the chief electrical engineer at that time in the Netherlands was Balthasar van der Pol who had written important works and was internationally known, but he was terminally ill. I remember that Rinia and I went in a car to make sure that van der Pol would support the idea, and he did. That was an important political thing because this was a sensitive political matter.
We had a newspaper called The Benelux Bridge, which developed, so that is part of the record. The files have been turned over to Martin Bastiaans. We had a very good series of meetings. I think our first meeting may have been the meeting on the SS Rotterdam where we were briefed on the electronics of this new ship that the Holland America Line had just commissioned. It was going to be launched at about that time. That was certainly one of our very first meetings. We had several, a bunch of good meetings, and somewhere or another the idea came that we ought to have a symposium on data transmission.
Hochheiser:
Now, had you gotten approval, official approval from headquarters in New York to be a section at this point?
Barrow:
Oh, yes. We petitioned, we got organized, and we were a proper section. Rinia was very supportive, and he became our first section chair.
Hochheiser:
Right. He had been an official with IRE, I believe. So, with his support.
Barrow:
I do not think he had. I do not know the answer to that. You would have to research that. I do not think there was any connection except receiving the Proceedings of the IRE between the people who lived in Europe [and the U.S. IRE], so I do not know.
Hochheiser:
Yes, that is something I can check. [Note: Rinia was a past Vice President of the IRE.] Obviously, the person who is the head of the Phillips Laboratory is a very prominent and internationally known individual.
Barrow:
Oh, that was very, very influential.
Hochheiser:
He became the first chair of the committee?
Barrow:
He was the first chair of the section.
Hochheiser:
Right. You were the secretary and treasurer, right?
Barrow:
I was a secretary and treasurer, and we had a vice chair from Belgium whose name escapes me at the moment.
Hochheiser:
Belevitch?
Barrow:
Yes, Vitold Belevitch. It got off and that is a separate topic we can touch on. For this interview we needed to.
There was another section that was formed in Paris. A friend of mine by the name of Jean Lebel formed the Swiss section. I met him during my year in Paris. I believe he formed the section in Geneva. About the same time, people in Italy got warmed up and formed a section. There had been sections in, I believe, both Israel and Egypt, but there was no connection. I mean, travel was not then what it is today.
Hochheiser:
Of course.
IRE European symposium
Barrow:
It was a big deal going to and from Europe. My first trips to and from Europe were on the Holland America Line and we spent nine days at sea. It was not something to be taken lightly.
The section turned out to be a significant success. I had somewhere in here the special edition of the IRE transactions on—oh, heck. I should have brought these things out earlier. Yes. This is the IRE Transactions on Communication Systems, one of the last. This is the March 1961 edition. It is all the papers that were given there.
Hochheiser:
Sure.
Barrow:
And it starts off, I have to say--
Hochheiser:
These are the papers that were given at the European IRE symposium on data transmission?
Barrow:
Yes.
Hochheiser:
Back up a little bit to help me out about organizing an IRE symposium in Europe.
Barrow:
Talk about the symposium. It was you send out an announcement, basically. The people in the section, and certainly with the support of Rinia and so on, we thought data transmission was a hot topic. We had tropospheric scatter, and we were learning to transmit at kilobits per second, which was exciting because up until that time you could—well, one of the problems was how many bits per second could you get over a telephone circuit. Telephone circuits were what we had. That was how you made a telephone call.
Hochheiser:
Yes.
Barrow:
They basically had a bandwidth of under 4 kilohertz. They were spaced at 4 kilohertz. You had a useful bandwidth of maybe 2,400 hertz, something like that. How many bits per second could you put through that? The simple systems were 1,200 and then 2,400, and then technology got fancier. These were the things that we were working on, and with tropospheric scatter we could get 10, 15 kilobits per second, if I remember correctly, or maybe 20. That gave you a chance to develop and push things forward. The idea of data transmission was getting to be very popular because there is a demand.
Hochheiser:
You have got enough computers in use now.
Barrow:
It is worth making a side issue here. Computers in use filled a room of this size.
Hochheiser:
Or larger. Yes.
Barrow:
Or larger.
Hochheiser:
[Chuckles]
Barrow:
Or larger. When I used a computer for my doctoral thesis, I had to travel to Germany to sign up for a computer. In those days, this was available to my facilities at SHAPE. In those days, you put your program on punched cards. I learned Fortran and made a program on punched cards. You would go up to a window and you would give your punched cards to the person who was using the computer. Then you would come back in an hour or so and see what had happened. I remember vividly coming back in an hour or so and there was a glitch because I had a semi-colon where I was supposed to have a comma or something like that. The punched card had to be replaced, and we did it right. I was using a computer because I had gotten into transcendental functions, not the ordinary sine co-sine, but hyperbolic functions. For that, we needed a fancy computer, so I traveled to Germany to get it.
Hochheiser:
This line of growing interest in data communications and tropospheric scattering you were doing then led to your role in this conference.
Barrow:
Well, that is right. I was a key organizer of the conference. I was not certainly the only one, but we sent out an invitation and publicized it within the IRE. I have an article in this issue of Transactions [of the IRE] that leads this off. I have an article entitled, “Why in the World in Europe.”
By that time, I am a senior member in the IRE. It says here, and it starts out, why in the world is the IRE organizing a symposium in Europe? This was a common reaction among those who early in 1960 read the announcements of the International Symposium and Data Transmission, the first large international meeting to be sponsored by the IRE outside North America. This symposium manifested the continued development of the IRE as an international organization. It did not represent the birth of international IRE activity, although, it might be seen in some respects as a coming of age.
How can the IRE with slightly more than 90 percent of its members living in the USA call itself an international organization? The question may be answered by asking another. What other objective can describe a professional society that numbers more than 6,500 members outside the USA that has local sections holding meetings in every continent except Australia, and it draws members from a dozen countries to a meeting in Holland.
A dozen countries showed up. The Bell Telephone Laboratories sent, I think, fifteen or twenty people to attend this symposium. The rest of the story is here; we drew attendance that wildly exceeded our expectations. We had to present the papers twice because there was no room at Delft. No lecture hall at Delft could hold all the audience, so most of the papers were presented twice. We doubled the program. There is an article here which I coauthored, called the “International Symposium on Data Transmission: Transmission Over Switched Telephone.” It is over switch telephone. It was written by H.C.A. Van Durren, F.LH.M. Stumpers, and B.B. Barrow. If I remember correctly, Van Durren was the PTT man, and Stumpers was, I believe, Phillips. I would have to look here and verify. But as I said, the symposium attracted a lot of attention. I believe it was the first symposium on the subject held anywhere in the world. The first significant bringing together [people from around the world]. It was a landmark, and the fact that it was so successful attracted a lot of attention back at IRE headquarters, of course. It launched the thought of pulling together the people in Europe because there must have been ten countries in Europe that were represented. It brought people together giving papers.
Hochheiser:
Right. There were people from more countries than there were sections.
Barrow:
That is right. There were no sections in that many countries yet, but it launched that. Somewhere in my files I had some correspondence. There were countries that were not enthusiastic, not surprisingly. England was not enthusiastic because they had the British IRE, which existed in those days. They had the Institution of Electrical Engineers. Those were very, very well-respected societies and they did not want to start an IRE section in a hurry. There was surprising opposition from Denmark where there was a national society that felt challenged. These political difficulties were surmounted, and I think from the very beginning the people who were involved with the IRE region and the IRE sections were sensitive to the requirements to respect the national needs of national societies. I believe that has been a problem that has been understood and grappled with internationally pretty well.
Hochheiser:
Yes. How did the IRE back in New York come to agree to establish regions instead of just the sections, when up until then all the regions were in North America?
Barrow:
Martin may know more about this than I do. I think it was a question of the senior people. I am trying to remember some of the early history here. When we had this symposium the president of the IRE attended and was very impressed. The name is escaping me. [Ronald McFarlan was the IRE President]
Hochheiser:
That is okay. That we can look up again later.
Barrow:
Basically, the activity that they were seeing from Benelux, from Switzerland, from Italy and so on, they said, hey, you know, this is a reasonable way for our society to branch out. The IRE, radio engineers by nature are more international than power engineers. Power engineers are focused, typically, on the utilities in the system in a particular country, and the government of that country regulates what they do, and so on and so forth. They have a much more parochial view because of the nature of their profession and their concerns. [However,] the radio engineers from the very beginning were international, and when they had high frequency radio brought in, there was that temperament and it worked in our favor. I do not remember that there was much of an argument. We petitioned, we had several sections in Europe, and we said, “hey, this would be a good idea.”
The problem at that time was that they were already dealing with the merger with AIEE. At the top level, which was beyond my level, there were certainly discussions that were going on, you know, what are we doing here? How will we manage? What kind of society should this be? As I said, Dean Richard Teare, the last president of AIEE, asked me should America be in the name of this society and so forth. The debate was held, and they decided an IRE region was a good idea. Rinia was easily chosen to be the regional director and he then led the effort from there. I went back to the United States in 1962.
Hochheiser:
I think it was in the summer of 1962.
Return to America, Sylvania Applied Research Laboratory
Barrow:
Yes. I think it was in the summer of 1962 that I returned.
Hochheiser:
So, at this point you finished your dissertation and your doctorate?
Barrow:
Yes. I got my doctor’s degree.
Hochheiser:
Was that simply a good time to leave SHAPE?
Barrow:
There were people who wanted me to stay. My family was back in the United States, and we just decided we had a wonderful time in the Netherlands. My daughter was born there and that was an experience which I do not need to go into details. I was present at her birth, which is not usual at that time. At that time, it was not usual for the husband to be present at the birth. I remember the doctor would come and go because he had a number of patients, and he was administering nitrous oxide to relieve the labor pains. He left to take care of another patient and he said, “here, if your wife needs it, give it her.” She looked at me and said, “no way. You are not a doctor.” Then another contraction came, and she said, “please, please,” so I gave her a sniff or two of nitrous oxide and my daughter came quickly
Hochheiser:
Having finished your dissertation, it was a good time to move back home?
Barrow:
We needed to make a decision. Some people decided to immigrate to become Europeans and I decided to move back home.
Hochheiser:
I assume you had to look for a job back in the [United] States?
Barrow:
Yes, and I did. I had a number of jobs. I worked for a couple of small companies; one was a startup that failed. I eventually joined the Sylvania Applied Research Laboratory. This was part of General Telephone and Electronics. I had a good career with them.
Hochheiser:
Were you still working on tropospheric scattering?
Barrow:
Yes. That and data transmission. I was working on data transmission, and I led some research. One of the engineers working for me was working on vocoders. The idea was how do you do voice coding and get it over a telephone line that maybe could only take 4,800 bits per second and so on. Those were problems and error-control coding were problems. At MIT and in the subsequent years that I was working, I had contact with some big names in the field like Irwin Jacobs, who was the founder of Qualcomm. He was a consultant of mine for a little while. In retrospect, if I had gone with him out to California and been his lieutenant and gone out to Qualcomm and been one of the founders of Qualcomm, I would have a few tens or twenties of millions of dollars in my pocket now. I did not want to go to California; I wanted to stay in the East. [Chuckles]
Hochheiser:
[Laughs]
Barrow:
Irwin Jacobs was one of the people I knew. I knew Andrew Viterbi, who has just been honored. I did not know him well. I knew [Amar G.] Bose. These were people I knew at MIT. I worked in Sylvania Laboratories which became GTE Laboratories. I worked with them for a number of years and then I joined the government.
Hochheiser:
What led you to make the transition from the private sector to government work?
Barrow:
Looking back, GTE was having some political difficulties. They were in competition with AT&T and they were definitively subordinate to AT&T, and the political situation for me there did not work all that well. I must admit that I was very bright; those are gifts that one gets with birth. But in politics, I was never very smart, so I did not do as well as I might have on the political side. I had friends who were working for the defense communications agency in Washington, D.C., and they suggested that, so that is what I did.
IEEE standards activities, visit to Soviet Union
Hochheiser:
Before we get to Washington, when you came back to the [United] States did you remain involved in what are now IEEE activities? Did you get involved with the Boston section?
Barrow:
Yes. Thank you for prodding me in that direction. Yes, I did. It was very interesting to me and I was active in the Boston Section. I became the chair of the Boston Section, which was one of the biggest sections in the IEEE. It still is. We sponsored, and I chaired, the committee for NEREM, which is the New England Regional Electronics Meeting. Regional electronics meetings are not very popular now, but in those days with travel, it was not automatic that if there is a symposium in New Mexico, we will go. That was not the way things were run, and the New England Regional Meeting was very important, and I chaired that. MIT was there and the Lincoln Laboratory was there. There were a lot of other major things, so that was an important meeting. I chaired that and as I said, I chaired the Boston Section.
I had carried with me from my days at SHAPE—this is another thread in my career from my days at SHAPE they needed a technical editor because they were publishing in English. That was the common language. I volunteered and part of my work at the SHAPE Advanced Technical Center took me into technical editing.
That led me to the discovery of international standards because much to my surprise I found that there were important bodies that worried about the metric system and that worried about standard letter symbols, and that worried about units, and so on and so forth. That is worth a little bit of a digression here, because in those days there were about eight different versions of the metric system, which were being taught. There were CGS systems, MKS systems, electromagnetic systems, electrostatic systems, and they all related to the units in different ways. This was a problem for international standards, so the International Standards Organization, ISO, and the International Technical Commission both got involved in these things and they come up with. As an editor, I discovered recommendations for standard units and standard unit symbols. For example, in those days when I was a graduate student, we measured frequency in megacycles, megacycles per second, CPS, MCPS, capital letters, little letters, so on and so forth. Then, of course, the international standard said we are going to measure frequency in hertz. I got on the [IEEE] Standards Committee and we introduced the hertz to the IEEE. The power engineers said, well, that is okay for you electronics, you radio types, but we will never use the hertz. Well, of course, that did not happen, and we see 60 hertz and 50 hertz all over the place now. That was an important standards thing that I got involved in. As I said, that grew out of my work as a technical editor, though that was never anything I did after I left SHAPE.
Hochheiser:
Then you pursued standard work through much of your career?
Barrow:
That is right. The standards work continues through much of my career. Let us see, in the IEEE Spectrum, this is a pretty beat up copy, in March 1966 I have an editorial that basically said IEEE takes a stand on units. What IEEE did was say, yes, we want to go with what is now called the international system of units, which grew out of the MKSA system. Basically, IEEE says, no, no, no we are not going to use stat coulombs, abamperes, dynes, and ergs. We are going to use joules, watts, hertz, and so on and so forth. IEEE backed that up and is doing a pretty consistent job doing that in its own publications and in its standards. That has spread through the American standards establishment.
Now the American establishment, of course, is very mixed on the metric system, which we have adopted for many purposes. In theory, the government has adopted it. There had been an American government committee that was formed for the conversion, and we were making good progress under Ronald Regan’s administration. They decided, no, no, no, we are not going to push the metric system. We are going to leave it up to the individual companies and individual people, and it is been a mess. But we have been making a lot of progress. The automotive industry has decided that if they are going to manufacture and get pieces from different parts of the world, they better be metric. They are metric. A lot of our manufacturing is metric, and we do sell some soft drinks by the liter and things like that, but we are a long way from grocery stores that are metric.
Hochheiser:
It is kind of funny because big bottles are liters, but cans are twelve ounces.
Barrow:
I know.
Hochheiser:
[Chuckles] If we could backtrack on this. You get involved and you talked about your editorial in 1966. I believe your standards activity leads you to be on the [IEEE] Standards Board?
Barrow:
Yes. It did. As a matter of fact, it led me to a position on the IEEE Board of Directors. I served a term on the board of directors.
Hochheiser:
What as? As the president of Standards?
Barrow:
I think so. That is not the way [because] there was no Standards Association at that time.
Hochheiser:
A Standards Board at the time?
Barrow:
Yes. There was a Technical Activities Board [TAB].
Hochheiser:
Right.
Barrow:
Standards was under the TAB or Technical Activities Board. That was an interesting year for me because that was the year that I got involved with scientific exchange with the Soviet Union. As an IEEE director, I went to the Soviet Union, which was an eye-opening thing. This was the middle of the Cold War.
Hochheiser:
Sometime in the early 1970s?
Barrow:
We have to look it up. Nixon was president. How do I remember that Nixon was president? I was in Moscow when Nixon visited Moscow. We must look up and figure what year that was. [Note: It was May 1972]
The thing was remarkable because we were in the middle of the Cold War. The ordinary people in Russia were incredibly friendly and very polite, too. If you were a foreigner, they would stand back and let you go onto the bus before they did. It was just unbelievable how the ordinary people were.
When I arrived in Moscow there were some very hostile bulletin boards. Uncle Sam was shown with bleeding corpses in his arms. This was totally anti-American in the public space, but the bridge from the airport to where I was going in Moscow was adorned with American flags because Nixon was coming that day. He and I were only a few hours separate and when I arrived there were American flags up. Later in the day, those American flags had all been taken down and we were back in the controlled environment. The people that I met, the people who governed the trip, were very controlling. You did not deviate from where they wanted you to go, but I had a wonderful trip.
Hochheiser:
You went there as a representative of IEEE?
Barrow:
Yes. Part of the cultural exchange program.
Hochheiser:
Yes. Would this have involved the Popov Society?
Barrow:
The Popov Society, that is right. In theory, I was attending meetings of the Popov Society, and in practice [too] since they were giving papers in Russia. I did have contact with some engineers over there. It was a very informative meeting, and I enjoyed it immensely.
Hochheiser:
What can you tell me about your recollections of either TAB or the Board of Directors?
Barrow:
Not too much. As I said, the outstanding thing would have been the trip there.
Hochheiser:
Sure.
Barrow:
I did not initiate anything that was terribly memorable in the Board of Directors. I did not achieve anything there. The big achievements were the symposium and the sections.
Hochheiser:
Right. Another way of putting it, what are your recollections of how the Board operated? You are exposed to a whole range of people coming at IEEE from a variety of different places and perspectives.
Barrow:
It was a big committee. There was, and I guess there still are today, some divisions between the power engineers and the old radio engineering types. It continues, partly today, because as I said, electronics is a much more international thing. I do not have any memories of major arguments or anything like that.
Hochheiser:
You are now at the top of the hierarchy as far as the Standards Committee.
Barrow:
Standards. Yes.
Hochheiser:
At this time was there a formal standards board that reported to TAB?
Barrow:
It was called a Standards Committee at that time. It reported to TAB, to my memory.
Hochheiser:
You were the head of the committee?
Barrow:
Yes. They then became a standards board.
Hochheiser:
And, eventually the [IEEE] Standards Association?
Barrow:
Yes. Now it is the [IEEE] Standards Association.
Hochheiser:
Now going back to when you were head of the committee. You come at the this from all your activities in the metric system area, but the standards committee, I assume, was dealing with a very wide range of standards.
Barrow:
Yes, they were. They were, in some sense, broader than they are now, in my opinion. The Standards Association now is dominated by a couple of the societies. The Computer Society is very, very active. The Power Engineering Society is very, very active. My sense is that today they do not go as broadly through electronics as they used to.
Hochheiser:
The other society I know is very active in this area is EMC, Electromagnetic Compatibility. I guess what I am really asking you is what were the activities back when you were deeply involved?
Barrow:
I was bringing in IEC and ISO, not just for metric, but getting them involved with the international activities that were going on, and partly metric. My mentor in that area was Chester Page of the National Bureau of Standards, which is now NIST. I have had a lot of dealings with NIST and the National Bureau of Standards. Metric was not the only thing that we were involved with, but that was certainly a focus. I have chaired for many years the Standards Coordinating Committee on symbols and units.
Hochheiser:
Right. I came across your name in a number of publications from that committee that we have here.
Barrow:
Yes. That became a major hobby of mine that continued after I was away from the political ends of IEEE stuff and no longer heading a section or doing things like that.
Hochheiser:
Do you recall any other issues that faced the Standards Committee while you were a member, both the chair and a member of it?
Barrow:
Nothing really. It was a developing organization. As I said, they became the [IEEE] Standards Association, but I was not involved with any of the change in the politics that developed as to how the change came about.
Hochheiser:
That is right. That is much later.
Barrow:
Yes. That is much later, and I did not get involved with any of that.
Hochheiser:
Now circling back around from IEEE to your professional career. Things were not quite working for political reasons you discussed.
Barrow:
Well, that is right. As I said, I had friends who—well, I became a Fellow of the IEEE at that time, and that attracted some outside attention, so I had outside opportunities.
Hochheiser:
Can you tell me a little bit about becoming a Fellow? I found it interesting that your citation for an IEEE Fellow is two very different activities, both your work in communications as a communications engineer and your work on standards.
Barrow:
Yes. That is the way it went. I got the IEEE Steinmetz Award, which was a major field award for my work in standards. That that was a major step.
Transition from GTE
Hochheiser:
All right. Let us go back to the transition from GTE.
Barrow:
I then went to work for a couple of companies for short periods of time, but not greatly successfully. I had good friends at the Defense Communications Agency, who kept saying you really ought to come and join us because they were interested in data transmission, obviously. I did join the Defense Communications Agency.
Hochheiser:
There is a period after you leave GTE when you have several relatively short-lived positions in the corporate world?
Barrow:
Yes. One company was a startup that failed.
Hochheiser:
Start-ups can do that. [Chuckles]
Barrow:
That kind of a thing. It was not my fault. But at any rate, as I said, I then had a good opportunity to join the Defense Communications Agency and that seemed very interesting, and it was.
Hochheiser:
What did the Defense Communication Agency do in the mid-1970s when you joined, and what was your initial position?
Barrow:
Again, data transmission was the focus of the work. I had a reputation in that area and that was the focus I picked. I am trying to remember now. Yes. That was class four or five switch study.
In those days, AT&T was the monopoly for long distance telecommunications by telephone in this country [the USA]. Now GTE, General Telephone Electronics, which I worked for, was also influential in some areas. There were some states, Florida, if I remember correctly, where they had a significant long-distance capability. There were a few other states, but AT&T was dominant.
We were in the Cold War with the Soviet Union and that, of course, had an impact on my work with SHAPE in Europe. We were still in the Cold War with the Soviet Union, and we went through this episode that I refer to as Alice in Wonderland because we had scenarios in which the Soviet Union and the United States traded thousands of nuclear warheads. You would do computer modeling as to what would be the effect.
Realistically, one nuclear warhead would do more damage than the New Orleans flood, or the problems that we are seeing today in the Philippines. It would be incredible. The idea that we would absorb 1,500 or 2,000 Soviet warheads and we would trade with them, and then have anything that would function in western civilization is bizarre in my opinion.
In those days one did not say, look, this is insane, we cannot do it. One had to examine it. There were plots that were made in which these warheads were absorbed on the terrain of the United States and every major city was hit. If you have 1,500 warheads, you soon run out of targets. Every major city was hit, every major bridge was hit, every major airport was hit, and each one of these is creating enormous devastation, but the government must continue to work in a program, which at that time was highly classified. I believe I am free to talk about it, in general terms.
Hochheiser:
Please. I do not know where the boundary is after all these years.
Barrow:
I do not either.
Hochheiser:
[Laughs]
Barrow:
I do not either. The idea was we would send people out, away from Washington, D.C., and there would be a unit of the government which would work. They had to communicate, so we worked on ways to make long-distance telephone calls through this totally battered telecommunications network of the United States. That was what we were working on. The idea was that, by golly, we would have a representative of the central Washington government, we would have representatives of various departments and they would be in a place which had not been hit by a nuclear warhead. They would work the government.
In those days, maybe, the government was trusted better than it is today. The people who were supposed to make the government work, for whom we were planning communications, had no medical resources and they had no way of giving food to the people who were starving all over the country. They had no way of keeping the merchandizing, the commercial parts of the government, working. That is why I call it an Alice in Wonderland.
The government could not say, hey, we are going to give up, so we worked on how to keep some form of telecommunications working. That was what I worked on then for some years. We had contracts. Then I transitioned and worked on coordinated telecommunications contracts. The so-called FTS, Federal Telecommunications System.
Hochheiser:
What time period are you talking about?
Barrow:
FTS 2000 was one of the contracts.
Hochheiser:
FTS 2000 means the year 2000?
Barrow:
That is exactly right.
Hochheiser:
All right.
Barrow:
We did the contract before then. This is to award large contracts to provide economical telecommunications service to government agencies. All the government agencies
Hochheiser:
Right. Meanwhile, the whole landscape is changed because the AT&T monopoly is gone. Now you have the transition to a communications system with many competing long-distance networks.
Barrow:
There were a few competing [networks]. There were three major bidders on our contract: MCI, Sprint, and AT&T. We had two competing contracts, which we were going to award, and much to the world’s surprise AT&T lost. We awarded major contracts to MCI and to Sprint, which had enormous political implications up and down.
Hochheiser:
What was the basis of the decision?
Barrow:
Cost. We evaluated the contracts and that was a major source election effort. We evaluated the contracts, and we were getting better offers from Sprint and MCI. Now there were some problems with this because we guaranteed hundreds of millions of dollars in business. Then, immediately, the competitive system went to work because there was nothing which would keep AT&T from marketing the Department of Energy, let’s say, or marketing a particular place. There were problems, but they shook out. I think that that contract opened a lot of people’s eyes to what long distance communications could be sold for because now the rates are ridiculously low compared to what people looked at then.
Hochheiser:
There’s another interesting transition. The first set of work you are talking about is during the Cold War, but now you jump to a second piece of major work you did, and this is after the Cold War is over.
Barrow:
Yes. Basically.
Hochheiser:
How did the agency manage that transition? It strikes me as an agency, from what I am hearing, that was largely devoted to work related to Cold War efforts.
Barrow:
That was because the Cold War was the dominant thing. It was the Defense Communication, and now it is DISA, the Defense Information Systems Agency. They still exist, and they are doing work in coordinated federal interagency level. It is mostly for the defense department.
Hochheiser:
I guess the question is that transition. You had a whole bunch of people dedicated to doing tasks that are related to communications in the context of the Cold War.
Barrow:
Yes.
Hochheiser:
Now the Cold War is over. For the agency if you will, a large percentage of its line of work is gone.
Barrow:
Agencies have a way to keep going. They focused as the federal agency, which would coordinate on the government’s needs for information systems. They do not have a monopoly, but they still exist. I retired about ten years ago, something like that. They still exist and are doing work subordinate to the Pentagon. Their main offices are a few miles from the Pentagon
Hochheiser:
Any other major projects that you worked on there besides on the Cold War post-nuclear disaster scenario and the FTS 2000?
Barrow:
Yes. There were. But I would have to go back and those certainly are the memorable ones.
Hochheiser:
These are the two most memorable?
Barrow:
Yes. One of the things, of course, is keeping up with the technological evolution, because remember, we started off here doing 75 bits per second and certain telegraph stuff. Then we moved up to a couple of kilobits per second. Now, of course, we are in megabits per second. And computers have--
Hochheiser:
All the underlying technology has changed.
Barrow:
Exactly.
Hochheiser:
You have gone from electromechanical switching to electronic switching, to routers and things that are not even recognizably switching in the telecom sense at all.
Barrow:
That is right. And, as I said, I retired roughly ten years ago, so I am obsolete. I know in principle how the cell phones operate. I know in principle what they are doing, but I could not consult on that kind of thing.
Hochheiser:
That is how fast this area has been evolving. It has been a wonderfully stimulating area to be focused on. But even just within the terms of year by year. I guess what I am asking you to do is think back to the state of communications engineering when you started, in the 1950s and 1960s, to what it was like when you retired.
Barrow:
Yes. It had been a very stimulating area to work in and it has developed enormously. One of the family jokes is that my wife remembers buying a computer in I think it was the late 1970s and the guy gave her a 20-megabyte memory and said, “that’s all you’re ever going to need.” [Laughs] But, of course, now we take color television, basically in our little handheld devices and--
Hochheiser:
Not only that, there was more memory there than there was in a 1963 mainframe.
Barrow:
Exactly. It has been a very thrilling and very exciting ride, technically.
Hochheiser:
There are some areas that are relatively static, but that is not one of them. Now I assume you continued your standards activities even after you joined the government?
Barrow:
Oh, yes. Oh, yes. As a matter of fact, I was with the government when a lot of that was going on, but I never worked standards for the government, at least not in any significant way. It was a hobby.
Hochheiser:
It was something you did on personal time?
Barrow:
Yes.
Hochheiser:
It was something, I assume, that your superiors were aware of.
Barrow:
They were aware of it, but the government was more sympathetic to that than, of course, the private industry could be. I never had a faculty position, for example, where I could have loaded that in. But you know, that has been a hobby of some significance
Hochheiser:
It is funny. I hardly think of it as a hobby. When you talk about singing in choirs. That is a good hobby.
Barrow:
Well, I have the responsibility. In theory, my committee had the responsibility of reviewing every draft IEEE standard and making sure that it conforms to the metric policy. I have not had the time to do it. I get daily messages from the [IEEE] Standards Association. Literally daily.
Hochheiser:
You are still on the committee today?
Barrow:
I am still supposedly helping them out, but in practice, they do a pretty good job. I have not had the energy, you know, I am 84 years old now. I have not had the energy. Looking over a standard and editing it properly is maybe about an hour per document, or half-an-hour or more per document, and I have not been doing it. I think they are doing a pretty good job at Piscataway.
Hochheiser:
The value of your standards work was recognized back in the 1980s when you got the Steinmetz Award?
Barrow:
Yes. I think so. The standard which was my flagship standard is the SI-10 standard, which is the primary IEEE standard on metric practice and the primary American national standard of metric practice. The last issue is just about two or three years old because standards must be maintained. My last project was to chair the committee that prepared the last issue. I am working on a current one, which basically applies this to the field of electrical engineering. If you give me a minute, I think I can pull it out.
American National Standards for Metric Practice
Hochheiser:
Sure.
We were going to talk a little bit about the American National Standards for Metric Practice.
Barrow:
Yes. It was not called that back then. In the March 1966 issue of IEEE Spectrum, and I refer to this earlier meeting, I had an article there called “IEEE Takes a Stand on Units,” which basically talks about what’s there and then gives the first edition of this standard. Chester Page was the chair at the time. He was the gentleman from NBS. The United States National Bureau of Standards (NBS) is the committee that represents the United States in the international committees that work on these things.
Hochheiser:
Right.
Barrow:
The IEEE recommended practice for units in published scientific and technical work. That is the only standard that was ever published in IEEE Spectrum. In the IRE days, many important standards were published in the Proceedings of the IRE, whichever, but they do not do that anymore.
One of the bones that I must pick with the [IEEE] Standards Association is that I think they should take a public benefit attitude and make this standard available on the web at no charge. However, the [IEEE] Standards Association will not do that, though they do that for some of the computer standards that are very popular and very well known. They want—it is either $10,000 or $20,000 before they will make this available, and I am rather angry and will be carrying that problem when I have the energy to do so to the Standards Board. It will cost them nothing to make it available, and it should be available to all teachers. You know, one of our problems is that we must teach two sets of units. It is wasting time and it holds us up. This would be a tool that could be made available, and it would not cost the [IEEE] Standards Association anything except putting it on the web, except it sets a precedent and they are not willing to do that. It is one of my unfinished businesses. I want to make a case with the IEEE Foundation that they ought to put up the money because they do things that are of the public good. That is another one of those bits of unfinished business that I have, that I have not gotten around to.
Hochheiser:
This publication has gone through many editions?
Barrow:
Yes.
Hochheiser:
You said the original version is 1966, and the most recent revision, the one you are showing, is 2011.
Barrow:
Yes.
Hochheiser:
How much has it changed over the years?
Barrow:
Significantly. The metric system, itself, has changed and developed in the international rules. It has been an evolutionary process. We have become clearer. It is now a standard for metric practice. Back then it was a recommended practice, which is a lower-level standards publication. It was recommended for published scientific work, which is a much narrower thing. Now we are saying, no, no, no, this is the version of the metric system that you ought to use, if you want to use metric. There are a couple of exceptions; the liter, for example, is accepted, although it is not an SI unit. So, there are things like that. I have a correspondence file this thick on how you should spell meter and liter in this country [the United States]. Can you believe it?
Hochheiser:
Unfortunately, I can. [Laughs]
Barrow:
I am a member of a church. In any church there are arguments that you can get into that are very small details. The publications of the International Bureau of Weights and Measures, the BIPM, which publishes the bible on what the metric system. That has evolved over the years, as they have adopted new prefixes and things like that. They originally published only in French because it was the French who invented the metrics system. Sometime, not too long ago, Chester Page, who I mentioned earlier, prepared an official translation into English as part of his work at the National Bureau of Standards. Later, the International Bureau issued an official English translation, so it is now in two languages whereas a century ago French was the recognized international language. Now it is pretty much English.
Hochheiser:
The French recognize it?
Barrow:
Empires rise and fall. I do not want to speculate on how long we are going, but there was the difference between the British spelling habits and the American spelling habits.
This led to a major—I had a committee that worked on the spelling question, which brought in linguists, language experts from the University of Chicago and from Harvard [University]. I have a file like this on the spelling argument because, originally, the version that came out of Paris used the British spelling, because British spelling was it, you know. This led to why are there two different sets of spelling. I do not know whether you know, but the reason we spell differently from the British is that Noah Webster, who made our first dictionary, chose to make some minor reforms in English spelling. Partly it was to be reasonable. Harbor is, H-A-R-B-O-R, and meter in his spelling is M-E-T-E-R. In part, it was commercial because he wanted to support the American publishing companies. [Chuckles]
Hochheiser:
This then leads to the twentieth and twenty-first century problem that you now have two different ways to spell certain words and not just ones involving metrics.
Barrow:
That is right. No. No. They are fairly broad. When we went into the argument, I pointed out that the R-E ending for words is usually, in this country, affected. We use it for theatre, okay. We use it for centre, when we are talking about a real estate development that is supposed to have a cachet to it. A pretension to it. That is right.
Hochheiser:
[Laughs]
Barrow:
It is also used, of course, in New England because there it is historically correct. There was an enormous argument as to whether it was correct practice to spell M-E-T-E-R. I pointed out in the other Germanic language speaking countries, like the Netherlands, they do not have that argument at all. They never spelled it M-E-T-R-E, nor did the Germans. But this argument went on and on and on. Finally, the international document says that the spellings differ with language. However, the symbols are the same. Small m for meter is also—even in Japan I found that and that is very interesting. You see the labels or the sizes of things, even in Japan I found, anyhow.
Hochheiser:
Interesting.
Barrow:
That is a side issue. But it did take a lot of my time and it was very stimulating because of what it led to.
Reflections, closing remarks
Hochheiser:
Looking back, how would you characterize your career as a whole?
Barrow:
I am fairly happy. I could have been smarter in some of the political situations that I got into. But overall, I look back and I feel I accomplished some very significant things. I earned the respect of colleagues that I admire.
Hochheiser:
What do you see as the role that IEEE and its predecessors played in your career?
Barrow:
Oh, I think very, very positive. I think certainly it was a positive. The IRE connections that I made when I was in the Netherlands and outside of my organization led to contacts and friendships, and so on. I feel that that has been quite a valuable part of my career. I am quite satisfied with that.
Hochheiser:
As you can see, all my cards are face down, so let me ask, is there anything that you would like to add that we did not cover or that I did not think to ask?
Barrow:
I do not see any major omissions in the redaction of this process. I may come up with something, but I do not--
Hochheiser:
If you do, as I have said, we can always add things when you review the transcript.
Barrow:
Sure.
Hochheiser:
Well, in that case, I say we are done.
Barrow:
Yes.
Hochheiser:
I thank you for your time. I have enjoyed listening to you talk about your career and your activities, both professional and IEEE.
Barrow:
Thank you.
